So, I finally bit the bullet and customized a blog instance for my wife’s choirs. Since I could use widgets, it was OK, but the hypothetical ease and the reality were two separate things. She wanted to have the main page only show one category of posts, so I had to go searching until I found out you have to edit the index.php in your theme, adding:
<?php query_posts ($query_string . '&cat=20'); ?>
before The Loop, and then that part worked. Next, she wanted other categories to show as lists in the sidebar. There’s a great plugin called ‘List Category Posts‘ that will do that on a page, post, or sidebar… sort of. The widget implementation doesn’t update correctly, and it only allows one instance to be in the sidebar. Of course, I needed more. Thankfully, it also respects ShortCode… but I didn’t know what the f8#^*$ that was. After a few quick Googles, I found that you can add shortcode in posts and pages… wheee! I wanted it in the sidebar, so then found a tutorial on how to get shortcode working in the sidebar text widget. Not bad, you just edit your theme’s functions.php and insert this line in a safe spot:
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');
Then you add a text widget and it Just Works. Brilliant. Far better than completely hacking the theme, which was what I expected would be required. Bravo, Wordpress!
