asechrest

If your theme doesn’t support threaded/nested comments, you might be able to get the functionality through a plugin. Could try WordPress Thread Comment to start.

It takes a bit more work if your theme’s navigation menu dynamically highlights the page you’re on.

If you can’t get it to work with Geezerd’s option, post a link to your site and a more specific solution might can be offered.

No worries. We all start somewhere. What I’d suggest is this…

Assuming you use a theme with a widgetized sidebar, grab that Widget Logic plugin, create all your pages. Now, as an example, you can do the following with Adsense.

1) Get your Adsense code
2) Put a text widget in your sidebar (save changes)
3) Paste your Adsense code in the text widget
4) At the bottom of that widget, you’ll see a text box that says Widget logic
5) Let’s say you want that widget to only show on page ID#7. You would put is_page('7') in that text box, viola, now that adsense ad only shows up on the page of ID 7.

Now if you want a different type of Adsense ad on page ID 5, you’d create another text widget with different ad code, and use is_page('5').

Now you can do this with any widget you have, whether it be a text widget, a recent posts widget, etc.

Pretty much no coding involved other than implementing a simple conditional, and the end result is you have sidebar with dynamic content.

Hope this helps.

I’m a bit confused…

How will you put content in your sidebar without A) hard-coding it or B) using widgets?

What other option is there to populate your sidebar with content?

I don’t know of a plugin that does this. However, you can take a look here to see if it helps. The article is from Jan. ’08, but I believe it still works.

Try the plugins I listed here.

Generally, you’ll want to use wp_list_pages() to form the navigation bar and then style it with CSS.

What I might do is take a look at some other themes and find one with a navigation section that you like. Grab the applicable code from that theme, and use it in yours. It will require some adjustments to work with your theme, and you’ll probably want to change style.css to alter the colors, borders, etc.

Yep, those mocks help. (Dolphins choke, heh.)

Here’s how I’d go about it if I were trying for a similar site, given my current knowledge. I’ll be working under the assumption that no theme exists that does most of this out of the box. Be warned, it’s going to take some coding, though nothing especially fancy because…well, I don’t know enough to be fancy. 🙂

I’d make Sports, Politics, etc., actual WordPress pages (Pages -> Add New -> Sports/Politics/etc.) Then choose a theme that uses wp_list_pages() or custom code the navigation bar using this function. Here’s how I’ve done it in my theme:

<div class="barnav">
                         <ul>
                            <center>
                            <?php if (is_home()): ?>
			    <li class="current_page_item"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" title="Home">Home</a></li>
                            <?php else : ?>
                            <li><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>" title="Home">Home</a></li>
                            <?php endif; ?>
                            <?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=1&exclude=163'); ?>
                            </center>
			</ul>
		</div>

For your sidebar:

Where you specify Pages, I would actually make those WordPress categories. Use a plugin and/or widget to list the categories you want for a specific page. So, for the Sports page, you’d use a widget (or even hard-code it using wp_list_categories()) to list only the categories that apply to Sports – Yankees, Eagles, etc. Then when a user clicked on Yankees, they’d be taken to a page listing recent posts about Yankees.

It should not be difficult to also list recent posts from the Sports categories in a widget below that.

For the main content of each page:

Then I’d create a WordPress Template for each page in the nav bar, and assign it to the applicable page. You’d probably call yours sports.php, politics.php, etc. You can copy your page.php or index.php and add and remove code as you see fit.

It appears that what you’re aiming for is a feature page for each heading – Sports/Politics/et al. So, for example, you could code your sports.php to list the latest X number of posts (query_posts()), using CSS to style as you see fit. Or to list some featured posts. Anything you want really.
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That’s about the extent of my knowledge, and I’m sure some of the forum-goers more versed in WordPress could provide a more efficient strategy, but that’s all I got.

Hope it helped in some way. 🙂