Theme development

I have a main menu being rendered in my theme:

drupal_render($main_menu_tree);

Works great assuming the links point to existing nodes within my site however when I access a page i know is not in the DB using a FQDN - this method seems to render nothing - so the main menu is missing??? Seems awkward to me.

How can I force the menu to always render regardless of whether the currently selected page results in 404 or not?

Alex

To quickly explain my situauation. I have an html sample layout already for an about page with a banner, a title and a few other little bits.

My idea was to make a custom content type with feilds like feild_about_banner and field_about_title and so on and then create a template for that node called page--node--[node-number].tpl.php and then just keep copy and paste the html into there and then replace the content with the feilds from the node. Now I have all of that working up to the feilds. I have the template working, I have the HTML in there and I am trying to put in the content and nothing renders... I don't really know why because I've looked at other peoples implementation of how to print out fields. Ill include a snippet of what I am trying to do the first code snippet being the original code (which is appearing fine within the website):

div class="container" style="background:url(/sites/all/themes/montreal/images/nir1.jpg);background-position:center;">
<section class="row largetoppadding bigbottompadding">
<div class="six columns midtoppadding">
<h1 class="italic whitetext">Rise Project Management</h1>

<h6 class="whitetext">We create out of this world experiences for out of this world brands and activate them across all digital media.</h6>
</div>
</section>
</div>

I created a image field and want to place it not in the content area. I want to place it after opening tag and output only the path to the image file.

I need following HTML/CSS markup:

<div class="headerimage" style="background-image: url(image-file.jpg);"></div>

I read some tutorials but not all works or are secure.

Hi there,

I am working with Drupal for a while now and I really like the theming layer. However there's one thing I still don't understand. Drupal displays my html code totally different, although I've structured the code. It's not about additional Drupal markup. I like to style my code just in a static html file. Drupal ignores spacing etc. Is there any way to control the dynamic output?

I've created a sub-theme for a parent-theme.

In the sub-theme.info file I've stated the single line:
stylesheets[all][] = sub-theme.css

The parent-theme.info file actually states 5 css files.
stylesheets[all][] = css/parent-theme.css
stylesheets[all][] = css/style.css
stylesheets[all][] = css/buttons.css
stylesheets[all][] = css/layout.css
stylesheets[all][] = color/colors.css

I've been placing css changes made to the parent-theme/css/style.css file in my sub-theme.css file and everything has been working out fine.

For Commerce Kickstart, is it better to subtheme commerce_kickstart_theme or omega_kickstart? I am looking to begin customization for my site and looking for the best starting point to do so. Is there a preference in the community or doesn't it really matter? Looking for suggestions and advice.

Thanks in advance!