Theme development

I am new to drupal, and am creating my own template by adapting an existing one. Lets say that the xtemplate.xtmpl file has a 'comments' item tag, which I do not want on my site, or may want to appear only on certain pages. How do I do this?

I have tried taking the item tag out, but then I get errors that cite the xtemplate engine. Thanks in advance!

Not really sure how this affected by the theme - but it seems to be.

I was working on a new 4.7 site using std BlueMarine theme and i had added some custom blocks.

Things seemed fine until i switched theme to PushButton and noticed my custom blocks were missing - but std ones were still there.

after a couple more tests:

- box_grey; custom blocks are OK

- box_cleanslate (which is based on box_grey) they DO NOT WORK

Could anyone please point out how to customize/change the display for URLs like http://www.ssvpsonline.com/profile/profile_passout/2000

I want to have this list in better formatted way.

Thanks

Is it possible to automatically set the length of trimmed posts to something like 50 characters instead of 200? I understand that I can use the break comment but this still seems a bit tedious as I have 100's of nodes. Thanks!

http://img161.imageshack.us/img161/8175/snapshot25bz.png

My problem, shown in that image, is that images are overlapping the end-of-node lines seperating the node samples on the front page. Is there any way to fix this? It happens on all the themes that I've tried.

ok... I am close to committing my self to the nut house after spending days on this very bizarre problem... too hard to really describe well; but will give it a shot.

- Drupal 4.7

- I started hacking up the box_grey template and css to make a completely tableless CSS layout

- was pretty close .. then WHAM!!! something happened

- I have stripped almost everything out of my page.tpl.php so that all I am left with is a few DIVs holding a few IMGs.. and NOTHING else - no borders, no content - nothing.

- so, if I am not mistaken... if I go to any page (by typing in url on address because I have no content on my page to select links from) - I should see my simple page.tpl.php - RIGHT????

and sure enough at mysite/admin I get the following screenshot:

www.allanalog.com/admin.jpg

all seems cool!!

however; if I go to a NODE (mysite/node/19) ... I get the browser taking very long to draw out a completely corrupted page with all images missing:

www.allanalog.com/node.jpg

NOW.. if this wasn't odd enough... if I do a view source on the corrupted page.. it looks fine... AND... if I save this source to an html file and load that.. it looks fine...

and one more thing to add to the insanity... I think this may have all started when in installed the categories module... and I think that if I return to a database which has not had the categories.mysql addition done.. then this all works fine....