Theme development

Hello fellow drupalers. I am new at drupal i just installed drupal 5.1 and i have been playing around with it for the past couple of days. Im having a big problem with forums. They look pretty bad. and after alot of searching i installed flat forums. i dont know if that is working right or not the forums are still pretty weird looking. I am starting to think my theme might be the cause. i am using slash black as a base. i followed all the instructions when i installed flat forums but not my post are all just gray. to test i installed flat forum on blue marine and it looks amazing.

Hi,

I am wondering if there is any lead to customizing a contributed theme such that it behaves something like http://www.netvibes.com ?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I'm having a problem getting Firefox to display a view. It outputs the first item in the view and then nothing else, while Internet Explorer 7 outputs the view no problems at all. I'm guessing this is a theme issue as when I look at the source for the page, everything is there. Anyone have any idea what would cause this problem. http://www.how-to-box.com/boxing - viewing it in IE works good, Firefox bad. That page also uses panels if that helps anyone...Thanks in advance.

How i can create top 10 rank node list(page, story or whatever) block with jrating module? I have installed jrating module on my Drupal.

I'm using Drupal 5.1 and trying to use multiple themes on my site and can't figure out how to do it. I know I can put different template files in my default theme directory, but I'd like to be able to use two separate themes residing in two different locations. For example, my default theme is in /sites/all/themes/mycustomtheme/ and the other theme I'd like to use it /themes/garland/. I put this code in my template.php file and it doesn't work:

if (arg(0) == 'admin') {
   $vars['template_file'] = '../../../../themes/garland/page'; // doesn't get page.tpl.php from /themes/garland/
} else {
   $vars['template_file'] = 'page'; // gets page.tpl.php from /sites/all/themes/mycustomtheme/ because that's my default theme
}

I just try to understand how this api thinkg works.
I need to change my user login button and i don't know what to do with this:

#button_type
Used by: button, submit

Description: Indicates CSS class to use for button(form-button_type)

Values: submit, ???

Usage example: (system.module):