Theme development

I've been pounding my head against this problem for a few days, so any help would be greatly appreciated. So...

does

print $sidbar_right; 

create about a 20 pixel gap above the content, and if so why and how do I make it go away?

Hello all,

Hi All,

I am trying to theme the menu tree's (Drupal 5) from <ul><li> based lists into <div> blocks.

Based on opencube quickmenu (http://www.opencube.com/index.html)

For example, desired output:

I am trying to limit the number of items displayed on a page from search results. I currently use theming to display my results in a grid - the age is outputting 10 items, it would be much prettier if it only displayed 9 (grid of 3x3). Can anyone give me some pointers pease?

Hello,
I have a site in which I've modified the bluemarine template to my site design (All the php is the same, just different HTML and classes). I have 3 sections of the site in which I want to display the content differently, however, each one is serving the content via the node.tpl.php file, so they're all the same.

How do I have seperate node.tpl.php files, or somehow tell that file to alter it's layout based on what section of the site I'm in? Initially I'm thinking of a switch statement within the file, but I don't know how to determine which section I'm in.

Also, I'm using the Article module, and it's showing the latest articles in the Articles landing page (after clicking the main nav link), but I would like to have these newest 5 articles to automatically appear in the main nav when the Articles nav link is expanded/clicked. I realize I can manually add the link to the sub nav when creating the article content, but I'd rather it happen automatically. I also would like to do this to my Blog section. I'd like to have the top 5 or so blog postings appear as a sub nav within the Blog main nav link. Basically I'd like my nav to generate like the example below automatically, and only display the top 5 newest postings in each category.

Blog
__ latest blog posting title
__ older blog posting title
__ slightly older blog posting title

Articles

hello,
I've a question regarding designing the site and then converting it to a drupal site. I'm used to working with Joomla and with that you can make any design and then assign the positions to div's. I wonder if it's a lot more difficult with Drupal to first make a design with xthml/css and then convert it to Drupal.
I ask this because our church is creating a new site with Drupal and I'm responsible for the design.

Hope somebody can help.

Sander Noorman