Theme development

Hi, I tried searching and found a couple topics on the matter, but it didnt seem to be resolved. I was wondering how I could display the parent item's title.
so it could be like this:
PARENT TITLE
- Sub Nav 1
- Sub Nav 2

something along those lines.

i thought the code could be something as simple as:

I've been working on a theme that's based on 'Goofy', but using the phptemplate theme engine.

It works fine but, like the goofy theme, it has a lot of white space between vertically-stacked blocks and nodes.

Does anyone know how to fix this? I'm guessing it's in CSS somewhere...

Thanks in advance!

Pete.

I'm trying out the Slash theme - I quite like it. Unfortunately it doesn't display the primary links tabs quite correctly in IE. There is no space between the tabs. Works well in Firefox though. A sample of the theme in action can be seen at http://xdeb.org/.

Would anyone know how to fix this problem?

Which of the following three theme engines is recommended for theme development for someone that has a strong css coding background? (and why)

• phpTemplate
• Xtemplate
• Smarty Theme Engine

Thanks in Advance
Panos

GOAL: Completely custom search BLOCK (my HTML source) located in the header .

EXPERIENCE TO DATE: With phptemplate, overriding the content of the global (top) search_box is fairly easy, by placing a theme_search_form() function and a callback in template.php.
Fine.

BUT.. if you want to tweak the format of the search BLOCK (in the header, or side blocks), that function is not even called.

So how do I now override the source HTML for the search BLOCK?

I'm trying to style my output from a custom module.

I'm looking at profile.module.

it has this line
$output.="