moisie

The easiest solution is to set them up using the same database.

Designing without tables does not mean doing away with them entirely, it’s all about only using them where appropriate – where you are displaying tabular data.
css does not replace html, it’s used to style it. If your html happens to have a table in it then you use css to style it the same as you would style anything else.

One reason would be that using /index.php/just isn’t as nice looking as the .htaccess route. In addition .htaccess is useful for people trying to mirror url structures from other software such as movable type.

A link may not automatically be https:// though, the majority of the time it will be but not always, could be ftp:// , https:// and so on.
This is how browsers work, if you make a page and don’t specify https:// or whatever is applicable then it will append it to the url of the site you are on or as specified by <base />

I wish people would stop saying that wordpress is a pain to style. WordPress itself is not since it uses valid xhtml and css. Admittedly css can be tricky but this is not the fault of wordpress, it’s the browsers. Personally I don’t see how much more plain the (outputted) code of wordpress can get than raw semantic xhtml.
I think some people need to realise that wordpress is not for beginners or people who lack knowledge about css, xhtml and php. WordPress can only be as “userfriendly” as the things that power it. If you don’t want to learn css, xhtml and to a lesser extent php then don’t use a piece of software that relies on them and demands a certain level of competency with them. Of course this is not to say that “beginners” shouldn’t use it, but they should be aware of the caveats of doing so.
This is not to say that wordpress couldn’t be made simpler to use and its documentation easier to navigate but it is relatively new and growing rapidly so things are bound to improve just as the software improves.
I think the wider issue, forgetting wordpress is that if users are going to go from more traditional forms of web design (tables, no doctypes, font tags etc) to standards compliant “modern” (ha) techniques using xhtml and css then the bottom line is that they’re gonna have to learn how to use them. And it’s very easy to do, there are thousands of tutorials throughout the web.

You could specify the image as a backgound of the caption (where it displays the month) something like:
table#wp-calendar caption
{
background-image: url(https://calendarimage);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-position:top right;
}
Obviously depending on how big your calendar and image may be you may have to add some padding, change the size of the caption, reposition the image but it would work.