Rowan hi -
Skin hacking is not all that easy right now. One thing that's now pretty painless is adding a [static] link to the "navigation" box - as of 1.4, you can edit an array of arrays in LocalSettings.php - searching for "currentevents" in DefaultSettings.php should turn it up. Other than that, I think trial-and-error is the best approach I can suggest.
indeed my eyes are wet from peeling back layers of the onion!
is there a way to include a form -inside- the content of a page? eg something like <nowiki> <form> ... blah
to prevent the wiki engine interpreting the form data, or allow it to render as straight inline html? since you can use standrd html table markup.. or was this an exception?
tx,
/dc