Theme development

Hello,

I am attempting a conversion of an HTML/CSS template I created by using PHPTemplate/Drupal 4.6. A rough example of the site template is: http://www.biblical-hebrew.org/

I have a number of issues, #3 and #4 being the most most important right now (and solving #4 alleviates the need to solve #2 or #3).

1: My current site layout is table based with CSS. I plan to move this to a CSS layout, but for now are there any specific concerns, with Drupal / PHPTemplate, I should have? Everything seems to work in my test run. (Once I figure out my problems below I will begin the process of transitioning to a CSS layout seeing as there are a couple of 2 column theme layouts, similar to what I am doing, available for guidance).

2: How do I prevent the sub-links from indenting?

By sub-links I mean "admin/access control" or "admin/settings/search"

3: I am trying to recreate this look I created for the navigation of my HTML/CSS site: http://www.biblical-hebrew.org/ (the left hand navigation is unordered lists with CSS, basically the same as what Drupal uses).

When you add a block style to the Drupal Navigation/Menus it tends to produce "gaps" between the blocks. The "Primary Links" and "Secondard Links" are fine when this style is applied--only the Navigation and User added Menus produce odd gaps I cannot seem to remove. I have tried a number of different themes and so far no luck.

I think this is a theme question. I'm trying to do some work in flexinode and phptemplate and need access to the user id of the current node's author. With this function, a user could be viewing a blog entry by a user, and see related story entries from the same user. I have most of this code, but I just can't figure out how to pull the node owner out of the node. The only variable in php template that shows the owner is $submitted, but this obviously returns much more than the user id.

I am attempting to use the Connections theme on top of the CivicSpace (0.8.3) packaging of Drupal (4.6.4), testing with Firefox (1.5), and as you will be able to tell, this is my first drupal site development.

I use URL aliases but now I need a block to display some content depending on a specific url.
And more my site is multilinguale.

Is there a way to find out the real url (without aliases)?

Thanks for help

I know this isn't strictly part of the theme files (will require some hacking in the code).

How do I go about moving the RSS feed button (or duplicating it) so that it is next to (or below) a category title? It is not very convenient for people to have to scroll to the bottom of a page to get that link.

Cheers,

Alex

Not sure if this is the best place to post this. I've recently installed drupal and have been playing around & reading the handbooks trying to learn as much as possible. I'm not a programmer or designer but have plenty of past html experience...but I'm totally new to the CMS space and in particular all the various custom/proprietary concepts that seem to be in each CMS package.

Below is a wire frame mockup of the home page for a new professional community site (for teachers) I'm working on with a small group.

http://www.ubp-dev.com/images/Design%20Possible%20with%20Drupal.pdf

My current priority: How much of this vision Drupal can do out of the box (with necessary installed modules). At some future point I will probably turn to hire a theme and experience drupal php coding developer to fill in all the blanks and make the appearance and functionality perfect. However, right now I'm still trying to validate that Drupal is the right platform for easily creating this vision.

the Latest Problem I'm having now: I can't seem to figure out how in the heck to just insert a static text box in the area marked "A new service from XYZ" without it showing as an article "Submitted by admin on Mon, 2006-02-27 14:08." with "X number or reads"...surely there is a way to just present static text on a page without necessarily showing up as a 'posted' content??? please help.