Template-trouble

Hello Developers,

At the moment I'm working on our corporate website, in Silva ofcourse ;).
We're using 2 templates for different sections:

- a 3-column template;

[header]
[menu]
[breadcrumbs]
[left column] [middle column] [right column]

- a 2-column template;

[header]
[menu]
[breadcrumbs]
[left column] [middle wide column]

Overall, the left column is used for navigation and indexing. The middle 
column is filled with main content. The right column is used for 
news-items (frontpage) and subitems on certain sections.

As I'm quite a newbie with Zope, Python and ZPT, I'm having some 
difficulties with some things:

#1)

As said, the left column is used for navigation/indexing. Example: at 
the 'people'-section, the left-column should contain a full listing of 
all employee-templates in the 'people'  folder. (Each employee has its 
own template with some info.)
I tried using a separate template called 'left', which contained a 
manually maintained listing. Not an option. ;)

Is there a way to retrieve a listing of templates in a folder, filter 
and display them?

#2)

For the menu, I used dhtmlcentral's CoolMenus. It's a Javascript-based 
script which uses it's own stylesheet.
Our adapted version looks like this:

[ item][ item ][ item ][ item ] [ ... ]

Implementing the menu was quite easy, but it has to be dynamic. So if 
i.e. section News has no items, item 'News' shouldn't be visible.
Is it possible to check for a section whether it's filled or not?

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
Yuri Smetsers