Theme development

Hi all, I really hope someone smarter than me can help me out :)

I have a php theme template that I made based on some of the default themes. It works great but the elements are global.

I need to have some elements display based on the path. Much like displaying blocks based on the path. Is there an easy way to do an "if" statement to accomplish this? I have no idea where to start.

Any help would be much appreciated.

how can i do this like tabs in drupal :

like this tabs : http://www.bryght.com/node/158 ?

I'm getting this error anywhere i point to my web site, i even cant login to my admin page to change the default web-site:

Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or '}' in /u1/home/my_account/public_html/bac/themes/engines/smarty/SmartyTemplate.class.php on line 35

Is there anyway from myphpadmin to change the default template?!?

Specifically, I wish to redefine phptemplate_comment(). Is there a way I can do this within a theme folder without changing phptemplate.engine?

In the handbook, only overriding themes function not defined in phptemplate.engine is discussed.

Thanks.

I'm trying to develop a theme, I'm using clean slate as the template.
I find that Drupal.CSS is making tables funky colors.
It was the background colors. I copied the lines from drupal.css and put them into the custom style.css and modified them but this doesn't change the site.

Should a style.css in a theme override drupal.css ? If it's supposed to why hasn't it. I'm using Firefox 1.0.
Thanks for any help. I'm still using drupal 4.5.0 I guess upgrading might fix this.

I

I want to create some static pages for my site - specifically they're things like an "about" page, help pages and the like. Obviously for these, I don't want the title, author links, or indeed anything except the page content.

Unfortunatly it seems that phptemplate doesn't have any templates for a static page (which is just a type of node, correct?) or variables to allow one to conditionally exclude the title, etc for static pages.