asechrest

No worries. I guess my confusion comes via this line:

I want the left sidebar to have ONLY pages AND posts that I create for sports.”

Generally, a sidebar doesn’t “have…pages and posts.” What goes in the main content area if the sidebar “has” the pages and posts?

In the header, are Sports, Politics, etc., created as WordPress pages, or is that simply a listing of WordPress Categories? (I’ve seen both in the headers of themes, and when you say “categories” I don’t know if you mean an official WordPress Category.)

If I’m understanding your goal correctly, could you do something like the following?:

Create Sports, Politics, etc. as pages. Create a template for each, which would, for example, allow you to modify the code on the Sports template to show only posts from categories having to do with sports. Then use the ideas I gave above to constrain any number of widgets to only the Sports page. These widgets could do any number of things, like list the Sports categories, list posts in Sports categories, etc.

No idea what the problem is, but did you or have you tried this?

Never used the plugin, but just found that with a search. door.php should be in your root directory, not the plugin directory.

One solution is in that thread you linked to, second post down.

Obtain the HTML code for the RSS link with icon (from Feedburner, for example), then use a text widget, title it what you want, and paste the code in the text widget.

Or, if you don’t want to use Feedburner, create the icon yourself, upload it to your images folder on your server, created the RSS link with icon yourself, and paste it into the text widget.

I’m not sure why you’d want to hack the default RSS widget when this solution is quite a bit simpler.

Well, as theme’s go, the one you’re aiming for is fairly simple. If you just need a theme that resembles that one, with somewhat similar functionality, you could probably find one that does what you need out-of-the-box.

If you need a theme that exactly matches it, you’re going to want to find a theme that gets close, and adjust the code to get the rest of the way. If you have zero coding/PHP/CSS experience, there’s a relatively significant learning curve, and invariably you’ll run into some snags. You’ll find it difficult to understand why your CSS is affecting your page layout the way it is, and you may struggle with the PHP code.

Generally, though, digging into a theme and playing around with it is a great way to start learning. It’s how I’ve done it, and you really do learn a lot about the structure of WordPress and what makes it go.

In short: If you’ve got to exactly match that layout you linked to, it’d put it at moderate difficulty if you’ve never done coding but have some general technical know-how.

Maybe try Advanced Category Excluder?

so for example, i still don’t want my users using the ‘tags’. i simply made a new plugin that has the following:

Unless I’m completely misunderstanding what you’re trying to accomplish, doesn’t the plugin Adminimize already do this?

Adminimize provides a full list of all modules on the Write Post (and others) page, and you can deactive each module for each user role, including the tags module.

Post how you fixed it so others who have a similar problem can find this in the future and work toward a resolution. 🙂