Theme development

I've only just discovered Drupal and I want to make a theme for it. I have been working on a layout for a site for a few weeks now which can be seen at www.scottscorneroftheweb.com/test-layout I have read heaps of documentation and I understand that you need to insert section tags, but i cannot workout where drupal draws the information that these tags are calling on. I have mucked around with the demo on opensourcecms but cannot work it out. At this point I am very confused.

Hello all,

I have been digging around trying to find a way to create a 'sub page' layout within my xtemplate theme. My client wants a more graphically heavy layout for the top page, and a lighter layout for the subpages. But, and I hope I'm wrong, the template engine seems to be oriented only around having one layout for all pages, period.

Surely there are others out there who use Drupal and have 'sub page' layouts!

Thanks for any pointers!
pb

My problem is this:

I have to include content (i.e. html) in node.tpl.php into a global $content variable if it is to be included in page.tpl.php.

Another way of stating the same problem is this:

The only node content that is being displayed is the content included in a global $content variable(passed from node.tpl.php to page.tpl.php).

So, the contents of the node file is not being included unless its content is passed in a global $content variable.

I am trying to style the standard menu. For example, I have taken the list of links and styled them to look more like pushbuttons by adding a box and a background. The problem is that the text that comprises the actual links is styled according to the standard a tag styling. I need to style the links in the menu differently from other links. From what I see in the html, there is no way to identify the anchor tags other than the active one is set to the "active" class. Is there a way to add a standard class designation to the anchor tags in the menu list?

Is there a way to show the actual text for a dropdown or multilist item instead of just displaying the number?

I am using something like this:

print $node->flexinode_25

and I will just get a number like 1,2,3 or 4 outputted.

I would prefer to have the actual label for that dropdown be displayed.

I have tried doing:

print $node->flexinode_25->label

but that doesn't seem to work.

I am writing a new theme based on the box_grey PHPTemplate. I want to modify the way the sidebar-left section appears. BY default, its in its own little table. This looks good, but I want to modify how the username appears. I want to put it in bold, or with a picture.
When i look at the page.tpl.php, i see a section like this:

if sidebar left != ""
td=sidebar
print $sidebar-left
/td
endif

The HTML this generates looks like this: