Jeremy Pry

If your drop-down menu appears in the middle of the page instead of attached to the parent menu, it’s probably something that needs to be resolved in your stylesheet. However, it’s not possible for any of us to know for sure without seeing your site. Could you post a link to the site?

I think I get it. For example, in a 3-column layout, “category-2” might be assigned to posts meant for column 2 and they would therefore be summoned in their own loop.

Yes, that is correct.

In answer to your question, when you create a post, you can easily change the post date to whatever you want it to be; the date is not hard-coded (so to speak). You can even change the exact time of day. That is one method of changing the order, and I’m sure there are other methods that are escaping my memory at this moment. I’m certain there are many plugins that will allow you to completely customize the order of posts.

The short answer to “Can we do this in WordPress?” is “Yes!” The long answer is that you could certainly take the time to learn what you need and do it all yourself, but it would depend on your familiarity with the technologies that WordPress uses (PHP, MySQL, HTML, and CSS). If you’re already pretty good with these, then picking up how WordPress works probably won’t be too hard, as it is actually pretty simple.

So, how could you direct a specific post to a particular slot in a page like this? Well, in my personal opinion, you might want to consider displaing much less all at the same time, but that’s entirely up to you. To display multiple posts in multiple slots, you can use categories and multiple loops. A simple example for the “Item” column and the “What’s Inside” column might look something like this:

<?php
$item_query = new WP_Query('category_name=items');
// Loop for items
if ( $item_query->have_posts() ) while ( $item_query->have_posts() ) : $item_query->the_post();
?>
<!-- Your HTML markup of the post items goes here -->
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php
$inside_query = new WP_Query('category_name=inside');
// Loop for What's Inside
if ( $inside_query->have_posts() ) while ( $inside_query->have_posts() ) : $inside_query->the_post();
?>
<!-- Your HTML markup of the posts for "What's Inside" goes here -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

Hopefully that helps you some.

Take a look at the functions.php file in the TwentyTen theme. There is a section that explains how to customize with a child theme. Look for the function “twentyten_widgets_init()”. That will show you what is being registered, and you can decide what to do with it from there.

What are the actual URLs to your site(s)?

The problem is the very first line that you posted…. The if statement that checks to see if the current page is the front page. Remove that if statement, and you should be good to go.

Currently, the purple highlighting as you hover over the links is because they are anchor elements, and have a style applied to a:hover. If you other text elements aren’t links, then the hover effect won’t apply to them, unless you apply it to those elements (such as p:hover). The only downside to that is that no all browsers will display a hovering effect for non-anchor elements, so just be aware of that before you try it.

It doesn’t appear that the body attributes are overriding your sidebar… It looks like the sidebar just didn’t have the correct style applied (although that mostly seems to be corrected as I look at the site now). You may also want to use <p> tags to contain your text rather than <div> tags, as that is more conventional.