Theme development

I want the mission statement in the chameleon theme to appear on just the front page. trying to capture the empty q with

if (trim($_GET['q'])==""){
	  if ($mission = theme_get_setting('mission')) {
	    $output .= $mission;
	  }
  }

Does not work for some reason. Works fine if I give a string value for q but nothing if check to see if it is empty or at zero length.

Ideas?

I wanted to add "submitted by" to the page teaser section on the front page. I saw this code in the Chameleon theme and thought that I could use it. But I can't find out how it is activated or if it is an automatic thing or if it can be set manually. At present nothing at all is happening.

I noticed that the chameleon theme is not complete and does not contain toggles in the admin for:

search box
mission statement
user pics in posts
user pics in comments

I search the docs on theme development and the Doxygen docs but can find nothing that leads to the procedure and functions necessary to add the toggle and features to this theme. Can anyone help out?

Thanks

I anm having trouble with the $primary_links variable in the chameleon theme. The print out is link | link | link | link so you would think you could do this:

 $arrPrimaryLinks = split("|",$primary_links);
	  foreach ($arrPrimaryLinks as $value) { 
   		$output .= '<div class="primary_link_node">'. $value .'</div>';
		} 

But the regex comes up empty and does not set an array. What am I missing here?

Hi Everyone,
I'm really struggling with a fairly simple customisation.

One the article/story/blog page the top element goes something like so:

Submitted by $username on $day, $date $time

I swear I've crawled through the template for my theme, as well as the .inc files and a few modules. I've even searched for 'Submitted by' but no luck!

I want to get access to the structure of the output as I want to do something like so:

I have spent the better part of two weeks trying to find docs on variables and core code to Drupal. I have yet to find even a simple list. When you look at a theme are variable being used but there is nothing in the docs that describe anything more that the fact that the say "hooks". Well okay but what are there names and where tdo they come from?

What's the secret recipe?