In this paper a family of non-autonomous scalar parabolic PDEs over a general compact and connected flow is considered. The existence or not of a neighbourhood of zero where the problems are linear has an influence on the methods used and on the dynamics of the induced skew-product semiflow. That is why two cases are distinguished: linear-dissipative and purely dissipative problems. In both cases, the structure of the global and pullback attractors is studied using principal spectral theory. Besides, in the purely dissipative setting, a simple condition is given, involving both the underlying linear dynamics and some properties of the nonlinear term, to determine the nontrivial sections of the attractor
