Theme development

Hello everybody
I want to theme my taxonomy pages - and for that i made a taxonomy.tpl.php in my themes dir.
Now - my page.tpl.php is as follows:

Hi,

I'm looking for a variable I can use in my theme which contains the complete URL (or better, only the not $base_url part of it). This is probably a newbie question, but I didn't find it in the documentation. Any help will be appreciated..

I'm trying to refresh pages of my drupal site periodically, but only pages that are not edit/add/configure pages. I'm adding the following code in my page.tpl.php:

if (!strpos($url, "edit") && !strpos($url, "configure") && !strpos($url, "add")) {

I'm trying to set a view which ignores the first 4 rows of the count, however when I set this as "if ($count>=4)" in the views-list-*.*.php the loop still runs for the first 4 items, outputting

Is there a way to set this in the template.php?

Thanks

I'm using the PHPtemplate Engine.
I've written a couple custom PHP functions to help with the theme layout.
The functions are located in page.tpl.php.inc. When I include them in page.tpl.php everything works fine.

Now I would like to use the same functions within block.tpl.php. This is where the problem arises.

I'm trying to restyle my nav menu list (http://linux1.care.uea.ac.uk/eduwebdemo) and I'm finding it difficult to get rid of the bullets displayed by the ul tag.

I changed the definition of the ul element in the menu to list-style-type:none; but it keeps spitting out the bullets.

Hi,
I've set the option to hide 'Published' on posts, as described in 'Show/hide 'Submitted by' on posts' (http://drupal.org/node/32050) - but it doesn't work with the theme Contented7.

Any solution?
Thanks,
Peter