I recently started messing with the StyleCatcher Movable Type plug-in to accommodate a few other blogs running on this server. On the surface, it's a great concept. Customizing templates on older versions of Movable Type was a bit of a daunting task and required more time than I cared to dedicate to the task. Now that the base template is centered around CSS, this customization process is a lot easier. Six Apart's style contest was also a great idea to get talented web developers to create a gallery of templates to showcase the changes.
Now that StyleCatcher is properly configured, I can appreciate how streamlined and simple the process can be. Unfortunately, it took a fair amount of tinkering to get to this point and it's still not behaving properly under all circumstances.
The first goof-up was completely my fault. I forgot that since the new styles are based on the current default templates, any older customized templates needed to be refreshed before the new stylesheet can do its job. This one was definitely a case of the problem being located between the keyboard and the chair.
The second hiccup involved the StyleCatcher plug-in settings. Apparently, you can't specify a full path for the "Theme Root URL". Or at least, I couldn't get it to behave properly with a full path. The individual blog sites continued to use the system-wide path (which was invalid for the individual sites) until I specified a relative path instead. I don't see anything in the plug-in's documentation about this, which was rather frustrating.
The final problem is one that I continue to experience. It seems that the images accompanying certain styles are not downloaded when they are applied in StyleCatcher. I don't know if this is a plug-in problem or one involving the packaging of the style in the repository. All I know is that about half of the time when I apply a style that includes images, none of them are downloaded forcing me to manually download and install them, which completely negates the advantage of using StyleCatcher in the first place. I'll have to make a note to investigate this issue further to see exactly where the problem is. The Firebug extension for Firefox should make this process a bit easier.
Finally, and this once again seems to be an issue with individual styles, it seems that the style specific stylesheet likes to import "base-weblog.css". Since the style is downloaded in to it's own unique directory, "base-weblog.css" isn't in the same directory causing the import to generate a 404 error. Making this error even more silly is the fact that the main stylesheet in the template ("styles-site.css") imports both "base-weblog.css" and the style specific stylesheet making the erroneous import redundant. I hate seeing the 404 errors stack up in my logs, so I have to manually edit the CSS file to remove the import (once again reducing the usefulness of StyleCatcher).