Theme development

I've been trying to make this work all day, and I've read countless web tutorials, all of which have ultimately been dead ends. Hopefully somebody here can point me in the right direction.

So I'm working on a site that's divided into sections, subsections, and sub-subsections. A hierarchy something like this:

• Home
  • About
    • detail 1
    • detail 2
  • History
    • detail 3
    • detail 4
• Community
  • Staff Bios
    • staff 1
    • staff 2

I'd like to have the primary sections ("Home" and "Community" in the example) appear as tabs at the top of the site. Then, based on whichever tab you click on, you should be shown a vertical navigation bar that's got 2 levels of nested links, but only shows you the options within the section that you clicked on. So, when you first hit the page, you are at the home page and the navigation menu will have "About" and it's sub-items as well as "History" and it's sub items, but you don't see "staff bios" at all. Then, if you click on the "community" tab, the "about" and "history" links are gone, but you see the "Staff Bios" link & sub-links instead. My problem is that for the life of me I can't figure out how to get a nested menu that also is aware of what section the user is in. The closest i've been able to come is using the Primary and Secondary links features, but even if I set up tertiary links & turn on the expanded flag for all the links, the php call for the secondary links doesn't bring up any of the sub-items. So, I end up with "About" and "History" showing up perfectly, but "detail 1", "detail 2" etc. don't show at all.

I have very long url's that run off the page. They are making the entire body too wide so that everything scrolls off the screen.

I am using bluemarine and cck. But this is a problem in story.module as well.

I tried to read about this. There seem to be many complicated solutions involving writing custom php text wrap solutions.

But I think there must be a simple solution.

Please tell me about all the options, simple to complex! thank you.

I have a custom menu, I got done the first level with theme_menu_item(). But I need submenus to have different class etc., how?

And I also need to wrap some custom HTML around this menu title...

Thanks for any good input!

Hi,

Does anyone know how the navigations in www.wooblelab.org was done? was it using taxonomy free tagging? if so how to make the words vary in sizes? I am new to Drupal, and just spend a month picking up xhtml and css2 I am ready to do some basic theme hacks, would be much appreciated if someone can point me to the right direction.

Thanks in advance,

SP

I have some trouble with the PHPTemplate documentation. It is very terse and only touches on some basic examples.

I am especially unclear about what the relation is between the various .tpl.php files and the template.php file. In which order are they evaluated, where would it be best to put overrides.
What happens when you override theme_node in your template.php and also have a node.tpl.php? I read that node.tpl.php is an override for theme('node'), does that have anything to do with it?

Hi there,

I'm developing a theme atm., testing it on this site: WoW Grinding Guide

I'm pretty far but I'm stuck with one problem atm.: Whenever you click on a news item (frontpage), e.g. "Grinding - explained", you will notice that the "Submitted by reteep" is way too far away from the title.

It's all correct on the frontpage but as soon as you click on a news entry the alignment is gone.