Drupal 7.x

Hi everybody:

I am learning Drupal development and am doing a website for a private high school in my area (Southern California, Inland Empire). I am a bit green. Here are a few things I would like to know how to do with Drupal (I'm on 6.22 in case that matters).

1) "Parent/Child" menus that drop down like so:
http://www.hpa.edu/

2) A front page banner that rotates through images (as well as inserts a watermark) like so:
http://www.hpa.edu/

I'm trying to use theme_preprocess_node in my template.php to modify the display of the "submitted by" information but I'm not having any luck getting my site to recognize the function.

I know my template.php already works because I'm using it for a handful of simple helper functions so I added the following code to the bottom of it:

I've seen similar posts to this but the solutions are not paying off in this case. I've made a subtheme of Omega html5. My front page is fine, other nodes have the right sidebar sitting under the left sidebar. In instances where the Content is longer than the left sidebar, it wraps to the left between left and right sidebars.

I noticed this after creating a slideshow view for my articles. Though I'd also been doing other things such as moving blocks around and messing with the global.css and creating content types and menus. So I can't really point to one thing that happened to crash this.

I've removed the styles I put in the global.css file, and I've turned off each block one by one ... no change. I've tried site validation tool and the css has a lot of issues that seem to be irrelevant except maybe that some items have no class even though the attribute is called up:
e.g. "Line 440, Column 87: there is no attribute "CLASS"
…ypeof="sioc:Item foaf:Document" class="node node-news-item node-promoted node-…"

But if that's relevant, I'm not sure what to do with that.

Interestingly, if I have the Blocks debugging blocks visible in the admin view, it shows a debugging block for both the left and right sidebars but NO DEBUGGING BLOCK for the content. The content of the content block is there though.

I've got a menu with many menu items (nodes), 4-5 levels deep, 4 languages. When I try to visit the menu admin page (admin/structure/menu/manage/[MenuName]), I get the following error on a white screen:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 81 bytes) in [foobar]/modules/menu/menu.admin.inc on line 142

The PHP memory limit is set to 128M in my .htaccess (confirmed by the Drupal status page). My hoster (shared webhosting) does not allow higher limits.

Quick question: I've created a field that users must fill out when registering labelled, "First Name"
I would like to use that field in one of the automatic emails that gets sent out but I don't know how to call that variable.. anyone know how to get it? I tried user:field_fname and user:fname (the name of the field) but it didn't work.. :(

hello guys...i have been brainstorming on a new idea that I would like to build with drupal. I'm looking for pointers.

I would like to set up a site where users who join up can get their ecommerce sites up and running. this means after filling in a form, a site is created. I was thinking installation profiles would make this possible, but how and what modules might I need to combine to fully implement this?

Ability to use subdomains would be a huge plus.

Thanks!