The DPS can be used now, just don't use the datamodel part. Michael Cleverly is using it at his job and he uses Solid.
As to the headers, the easiest way to change the appearances of most standard ACS pages is customizing ad_header. I usually do that _and_ create an ADP tag that can be used form tcl pages by editing tcl/yoursite-styles.tcl (move photonet-styles.tcl to become yoursite-styles.tcl)
