Two columns of text

Tom,

Personally, I’d absolutely use CSS to create the second column as the alternative is, well, tables and, to me that’s just no good, unless it’s tabular data you’re displaying.

I’m sure there are others out there with way more experience than I when it comes to this, but I’ve attacked this problem in a few ways:

1. Use Custom Fields for your content and in the sidebar template use some php to call the contents of the custom field if it exists.
2. Create a ‘page’ that’s dynamically ‘pulled’ into the sidebar using some custom php code
3. If the users really aren’t going to edit the sidebar, you could create separate sidebars called via includes, or change the content based on Conditional Tags

Examples:

#1 assumes I’ve added a custom field to some pages titled aside-text and typed whatever content in that I want for the value of that field.

It checks the custom field for that page and, if there’s a field called aside-text, it’ll print out the contents of it’s associated value field.

I’ve used this with images as well.

<div id=”content-aside”>
<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, “aside-text”, true)): ?>

<?php $key=”aside-text”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>

<?php endif; ?>
</div>

#2 assumes I’ve created a page named ‘About’ and am dynamically ‘pulling’ it into another part of a template, such as a sidebar or footer.

<?php query_posts('pagename=about'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
	<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
	<?php the_title('<h4>', '</h4>'); ?>
	<?php the_content(); ?>
	<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Like I said, there are probably slicker ways to do this, but these are a few I’ve employed.

No problem. I’d spend some time searching in these forums, the plugins directory, and with our good friend, Google, to see what else you can find.

Those two tricks have worked quite well for me. Usually, though, my clients don’t really update their sites as much as they think they will.