jonimueller

I don’t see anywhere in your code where you tell WP to pull in the latest five posts. And then it is always going to put the latest post on the front page of the blog anyway. There is a workaround for that too. Have you read the Codex pertaining to The WordPress Loop? Start there.
http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop
http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop_in_Action

Not only that, much like an Immortal, there can be only one .. sidebar.php or footer.php file to be called. Alternate files are called using the call to the template path, not get_sidebar or get_footer. Those will only call that main instance of footer.php or sidebar.php. So if you have multiple sidebars, those are called using the template path. Make sense?

@okperry .. be warned, even though Kubrick is popular and Michael Heilemann is a talented designer, I take issue with the Kubrick theme because he embeds images in the HTML, and really, just put it in the CSS where it belongs. This trick throws a lot of newbies off. Keeping all of the style elements (especially header graphics) in the stylesheet makes revising the site much easier in the long run. So it’s not a good theme to “learn” on. Make sense?

Here’s a handy cheat sheet.
http://wpcandy.com/articles/tutorials/the-wordpress-help-sheet.html

Being a web designer by trade and having designed many many WP themes over the years, I’ve found that just to get my feet wet, I’ve done what some others here have done: Taken a theme whose layout is similar to what I’ve got in mind and working it up to suit myself. That can be good, as it is a quick way to get a theme up and running but the downside is, as others have discovered, you waste time picking things apart and while you can learn from it, if you picked a theme done by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing with regard to CSS or WP, you may end up not only developing your own bad habits, but inheriting some bad habits from the other stylesheet author.

As time has gone by and I’ve learned more and more about CSS and WordPress, and as WordPress has grown, I’ve found that just working up the design and laying out the divisions in HTML is where I start. Then once I’m satisfied with that, and it all validates, I start slicing it up and plopping the WP code in. This seems to work for me and fosters creativity and thinking outside the box more than expanding on someone else’s code. And no one likes to clean up someone else’s mess, right? 🙂

I just think you should quit trying to bend WP just for the sake of doing so. the /category/ hierarchy was designed for a reason. If you use permalinks, it’s not hard to figure out what the link to a particular category will be if you wish to put a hard-coded link somewhere in your sidebar or elsewhere.

Now, if you want to be really sly about it, you can create a page template, as described here:
http://www.ivovic.net/2008/05/20/turn-a-wordpress-page-into-a-link

Then create a new WP Page, title it however you want the link to appear, plop the URL to the category into the writing area and make the permalink whatever you want.

And as a theme developer myself, I can pretty safely say that most images are there to be changed out for one that is more personal to the blogger. The biggest requirements are usually that you are not to redistribute the theme and you should leave a link to the theme designer’s site in the footer or on a colophon page. But when in doubt, read any license documents that ship with the theme, or better yet, double check with the theme’s author. 🙂

I am the theme author. I’ve been involved with my husband’s health issues but if you will be so kind as to contact me at joni (at) pixelita (d0t) com, I’ll widgetize it for you. It’s something I need to do to all our themes, just haven’t had the time.