Theme development

The Theme developer box works fine on the Dashboard and other admin pages.

But on the public facing "theme" pages it doesn't show at all.

So far I have:

a) Uninstalled and Reinstalled the Theme Developer Module AND simplehtml API version 7.x-1.12
as per https://www.drupal.org/project/devel_themer

b) Checked the Permissions page but can't see anything related to Theme Developer permissions

Hi! I haven't updated my site in a while and received the security notification to update to 7.32 as my site was still in 7.13 (I think). In updating through GoDaddy, it failed and my site was only updated to 7.22. However, now my nice menu's don't show up. (I did run the update.php as well and had no updates.) Now I get this message:

Notice: Uninitialized string offset: 0 in include() (line 108 of /home/content/00/8394600/html/themes/busy/templates/page.tpl.php).

Here is the partial code in the page.tpl.php:

What is the correct way to make a ie8.css for the subtheme, and keep intact in the same time the original ie8.css of the base theme? I am struggling for almost 2 days so far trying to override without success the ie8.css of themes Mayo and Danland, with subthemes'ones.

So I've been messing around with creating my own sub-theme using Omega 4.

I would like to use the off canvas layout, but it appears to exist in Omega 4/Layouts/ and not in my sub-theme folders.

The question is; Should I be editing the Omega 4/Layout/Off Canvas files directly? Should I import them into my sub-theme.

What are the best practices for editing parent theme files to effect a sub-theme?

I am having a Drupal 7 site built by freelancers through a company called Ziptask. The developer created a subtheme from Omega when building the site, and now a different themer has been brought in to make the site properly responsive. I am a beginner when it comes to CSS, but I did see that the themer added 138 instances of the !important selector in the subtheme's CSS. From what I can tell by my research, that's a bad thing.

In one of my views.tpl file
The code is :

<?php print render(block_get_blocks_by_region('XXX')); ?>

But this give me Strict warning: Only variables should be passed by reference???