Theme development

My guess is that I am doing something incredibly dumb but I am stomped and hope someone can point out my mistake.

I am adapting a template to Drupal. I created a new search-box.tpl.php:

<div><div id="search" class="container-inline"><div class="form-item">
<input type="text" maxlength="128" class="my_form-text" name="edit[keys]" id="edit-keys" size="15" value="Search" onClick="value=''" onBlur="value='Search'" alt="Enter the terms you wish to search for." />
</div>
<input type="submit" class="my_form-submit" name="op" value="GO" />
<input type="hidden" name="edit[form_id]" value="search_box" />
</div>
</div></form>

Added:

function phptemplate_search_theme_form($form) {
  return _phptemplate_callback('search-box', array('form' => $form));
}

to the template.php file.

Added $search_box to page.tpl.php as follows:

  <div id="main_content_area">

    <?php if ($sidebar_left) { ?><div id="left_side">
      <?php print $search_box ?>
      <?php print $sidebar_left ?>
    </div><?php } ?>

    <?php if ($sidebar_right) { ?><div id="right_side">
      <?php print $search_box ?>
      <?php print $sidebar_right ?>
    </div><?php } ?>

    <div id="content">
      <?php print $search_box ?>
      <?php print $content; ?>
    </div>

  </div>  <!-- END MAIN CONTENT -->

I inserted the $search_box variable in each section of the template to see if I get a search box. My search box appears in all the sections except for the right sidebar where I get nothing. What next?

Looking for someone experienced with Drupal theme development to build a theme based on our original site for Drupal. Please email me at xx666xx "at" gmail.com.

Thanks,
J

Hey guys,

First of all ... Hi 2 all ...
I'm new on drupal.

A friend of me has a site which is working on Drupal, but its design looks really bad.
Now he asked me if I can make a new design for him.

I'm a webdesigner (html, flash etc), but I'm totally new on blog sites and Drupal.

my experience with png files is they show 5 different colors in 5 different browsers, a nightmare. I just want to use a gif but have no idea how. I see that my them calls $logo but from where? Or how do I change it? thanks!

In my user profile I use a custom field named field_country, which is actually a list of countries. (like descibed here: http://drupal.org/node/35728)
This field is part of the registration process.

Now I'd like to set up a view getting all nodes submitted by authors/users from the country they selected.

I want to change the display of tabbed menu items to block images and text (like in aquasoft theme).

As such I wanted to access the menu_primary_local_tasks() function (which lives in includes/menu.inc) within template.php, then to walk through the array and make the changes.

How can I get access to that function in template.php?

I noticed that the aquasoft developers were able to access menu_primary_links() in there with no "include_once" or other visible means of connection.