Theme development

I thought it would be good to have a "steps to convert your design into a drupal theme" page in the drupal handbook.
Im working on documenting the process from start to finish the steps required to fully integrate a design into drupal from scratch.
To start with I have created a simple interface design mockup that will be the main page template for a stock drupal setup.
my original post is on my site here including screenshots:
http://isaachorton.liquidratio.com/2006/01/drupal_theme_customization_doc/

My goal is to fully document (with screenshots) all steps in the process along with any code snippets and tips for converting that come up along the way. I noticed in working on my own theme development that is very cumbersome and time consuming just searching for code snippets to do common functions/enhancements(ie style $links or something like that), so i think this will be beneficial to anyone just getting started theming for drupal to find this info in one nicely organized location!

If anyone has any pertinent advice that they would like to offer, I will be going through any and all suggestions and including appropriate ones in a final list of "recommended" reading/resources for themers.

Ill also be covering hot topics relating to theme development and other UI concerns, like use of AJAX, Flash, Javascript, CSS, coding standards and all that fun stuff!...

next steps include:

I've ported William Pramana's fine Golden Gray Wordpress theme to Drupal 4.7 for a site I'm creating. It was a quick job so there are likely issues but it works reasonably well. It has been tested with Firefox 1.5, Opera 8.5, and IE 6 on Drupal 4.7.0-beta3 with a modicum of modules (forum, blog, image, and other core modules) enabled.

Known issues include:

I'm developing a new theme and I need the menu items to have on-states. I'm using the menu module. I figured out that I can compare the url path to the items in the menu_get_menu array, but is there a cleaner way to do this? Is there a function that will tell me which page I'm on?

Thanks!

Moses

Is it possible to display my breadcrumbs only on pages with in the forum section? Is there some type of code I can insert that only shows it on pages with "/forum" in the URL?

Thanks!

I'd like to include a search form inside my flash header file. The problems is, I can't figure out how to get flash to submit the field drupal uses for search terms "edit[keys]". Is there a different non-array style term I could use like "keys" instead of "edit[keys]". Or, is there a way that I can get flash to submit "edit[keys]".

Thanks.

How to create language switch like that?