I installed the WordPress “Thesis” theme this weekend.   I was hoping for some easily customizable sidebars for use with PAGES.  Here’s why.   I have (in my now inactive K2 theme)  some custom sidebar.php files for three types of pages. The “Pages” I created have to do with “Church of the Saviour” ,  which was represented on my homepage by a TAB in between the “Home or Blog”  tab and the “Old Sites of Mine” tab.  Under that page,  I have three pages.  One is an interview with the founding pastor and his wife.  The other two pages each have several pages under them.  They are “books” that I got permission from COS folks to put online.  Each book has several pages.

I was hoping I could have a custom sidebar with the three top level pages links in the sidebar (and perhaps drop down or indented links to subpages under the two book pages.   And then, in the sidebar on the two book pages,  the subpages under each,  possibly with an indication in the list as to which page one is presently viewing (like graying out of the link or something equally apparent). 

Hope I can find such a plugin that would let me do this,  or something that doesn’t require some knowledge of the “hooks” and the custom_functions file. 

I may be doing a temporary measure to re-open those Church of the Saviour Pages (creating the nav drop downs to display all the pages and omit the sidebars on those pages (which can all be done via the Thesis admin interface)….and I’m also going to deepen my knowledge of WordPress and its php functions (as well as some of the techniques used by Thesis).   But until then,  I am on the hunt for some plugin goodness.