For the zones I used a 3*5 table to handle the position of the zones. We had the middle area set up as one zone for each row instead of two and the other two side areas were split in half(the picture below should show how I set it up). When you click on a cell in the table it adds the none attribute to the table and the block attribute to the div holding the buttons for that zone. sorry about the php code, it's quite sloppy.
