Theme development

Hi fellow themers --

It seems like the "Navigation" block is kinda forced into Drupal's otherwise amazingly themeable system. I'm interested in designing some themes which do NOT use a hierarchical collapsable menu-tree for navigation and especially administration. Right now, it seems I can't theme-away the tree-style menu.

Does any module exist or is there any plan to untie Drupal from the hierarchical navigation system? I realize there's no direct way to create the same functionality as the tree-style design, but I'm thinking maybe abstracting the admin menu (and others too, but the admin menu is what really stops me from designing themes without a tree-style menu) into multiple pages, which should hopefully bring back the functionality of nested menus.

I'm thinking that if something like this does NOT exist, maybe it's worth adding a module or contributing to the Drupal core so one could automagically generate non-tree style menus by having Drupal generate multiple subpages that correspond exactly to each subtree in the tree-style menu.

Hopefully someone knows if this functionality already exists, otherwise I have intentions to implement it! 8-)

Do I sound crazy, or does this make sense? It's motivated by the fact there are a lot of wonderful web designs that are incompatible with the hierarchical tree-style menu necessary to administrate (is that a verb?) Drupal.

Hey guys,

Very new to Drupal but I'm jumping in head first. I've just created a new design for our website, along with creating tabless XHTML+CSS code. The code/layout can be viewed here:

http://www.washsq.com/beta/

Now, I need to somehow write a theme with PHPTemplate to make it look like that. Shouldn't be too hard I'm thinking.

However, I'm not even sure where to start! Are there any good tutorials on the net I should follow?

Is the PHPtemplate giving you the same amount of freedom you can get with coding a plain PHP template?

Should I be concerned about the continued support of XTemplate going forward? I think it's a great addition to Drupal.

If you look at this node, http://giveorange.org/node/551 you will see an image in the right side of the node. I'd like to move all right sidebar blocks into this portion of the page so node text will wrap around and under the blocks if there are only a few, rather then having the right sidebar stretch all the way down the length of the page even if the blocks don't stretch that far, any ideas how to do this?

I've got an image right beside a paragraph.

Basically, it looks something like this:

<p>text</p><img src="/example" />

But what ends up happening is the image displays below the paragraph, when I want it to display beside it.

What CSS can I use to get the image to display to the immediate right of the paragraph?

Thanks :)