Theme development

Hi All,

I've been contracted to do a huge project with drupal as the cms, and It's going to require the use of all my skills and knowledge of drupal!
My question is does anyone know of any way of it being possible to put an ajax box (or div?) on the frontpage. Basically, It would be a comment area for members that I would build to mimic an instant chat, therefore was going to use ajax to reload just that div to display the newly posted comment.

Anything would be helpful on this!

Thanks for your help in advance,

I am working on my first drupal proj. Bascilly, I want to have my feature stories and latest forum posts on the front page.

Feature stories gonna be on the left of the content region, and latest forum posts gonna be on the right.

I only need to show title , author name and post date of feature stories and latest forum posts.

I know how to customize tpl file. but don't u have to query the DB to get those info? what file we have to modify to add the query, how to pass it to page_front.tpl.php page.

thank you so much for help.

I'm trying to work with the $primary_links array at the moment, thanks to posts on the forum and within the handbook. However I can not seem to find any reference to its contents apart from two attributes including:

$link['href']
$link['title']

I'd really like to be able to pull the description field out into my template.

Hello all,i just made a image preset for my thumbnail, no the problem is that it apears beneath my tease and not in it..

i already found the div but i want it inline the teaser

see the screenshot for how i want it..

http://img260.imageshack.us/img260/9075/howmm7.png

i hope somebody can help me with this..

Does anyone know how to show only the first 20 characters of a views field?

I've used CSS for quite a while for text and link styles on static sites, however this is the first time I've used it for CMS layout and could do with some help. I'm developing a custom theme based on the theme Foundation and I need to create separate CSS styles for the primary menu links, navigation menu links and content links.

The problem is that the Foundation style.css file only has one set of styles for all links, wherever they are on the page:

a:link { color: #C0C0C0; }
a:visited { color: #C0C0C0; }
a:active { color: #ff0000; }
a:hover { }

However, since my theme has different background colours for the primary menu, left sidebar and body, I need to have separate CSS styles. I've found classes that relate to the different sections however they seem to relate to layout:

.header .navigation .navigation-primary { }
.sidebar-left { float: left; width: 20%; height: 100%; background-color: #2462A9; padding-top: 10px; padding-left: 0px; }

I'm guessing I have to create new classes for the primary and navigation links but I'm not sure how to call these within page.tpl.php. As you can see from the code below, I've managed to create a new class called menubar for the primary menu background, however any help on how to sort out the css for the links would be greatly appreciated.