Theme development

Thanks in advance for everyone taking a look at this. I am very new to drupal (72 hours) and I need some guidance and please forgive me if I use the wrong terminology.

I am trying to make some changes to a site that has drupal installed and is using a custom php theme. The design calls for a graphical header for each node (ie, news, about us, support, ect) followed directly below by breadcrumbs.

Here's what I'm doing:
I am working with phptemplate. I've exposed my theme (taken from Friends electric as a starting piont) with colour and made some adjustments. I haven't hacked any php yet, but am planning that now, for functionality.

I just wanted to say that Personal theme cv placed in my themes folder breaks the admin/themes page on load up.

After whining about it for the last week, I somehow managed to splice all of the goodies that I want from the new (4.6) phptemplate.engine into the old one (4.5.2). The new engine has the $zebra functionality and the ability to load node-$type.tpl.php files for different node types. This engine does NOT allow for multisite config. If you are interested please contact me via my drupal contact info and I'll be sure to email it to you.

Mateo

OK, so I have this completely hacked mangled thing that I call a theme, and it's surprisingly pleasing to me given my complete lack of understanding of CSS. I am definitely adding "working knowledge of CSS" to the list of tasks once I go off active duty, but in the meantime, I have a really annoying visual element I can't figure out how to fix.

Hither is an example: http://www.sobrania.net/user/register

Hello all.

I am attempting to re-do how the theme_bookreview_list function is displaying my books. In template.php I have the following function to override the theme_bookreview_list function:

function phptemplate_bookreview_list() {
  $header = array(' ', array('data' => t('Title'), 'field' => 'n.title', 'sort' => 'asc'), array('data' => t('Author'), 'field' => 'b.author'));

  $sql = "SELECT DISTINCT n.nid, n.title, b.author from {node} n INNER JOIN {bookreview_authors} b on n.nid = b.nid WHERE n.type = 'bookreview'";
  $sql .= tablesort_sql($header);
  $result = pager_query($sql, 20);

  while ($node = db_fetch_object($result)) {
$output = '<table width="100%"><tr><td>';

    if ($node->title) {$output .= '<h2>'. l($node->title, "node/$node->nid"). ' - ';}
    else {$output .= '<h2>No Title';}

$output .= '</td><td align="right">';
    if ($node->author) {$output .= t($node->author). '</h2>';}
    else {$output .= 'Unknown Author </h2>';}

$output .= '</td></tr></table>';
    $rows[] = array(array('data' => $output, 'colspan' => '5'));
  }

  if (!$rows) {
    $rows[] = array(array('data' => t('No books available.'), 'colspan' => '4'));
  }

  $pager = theme('pager', NULL, 20, 0);
  if (!empty($pager)) {
    $rows[] = array(array('data' => $pager, 'colspan' => '2'));
  }

  return theme('table', $header, $rows);
}
?>