Help me!

Sounds like a lot of work! I have no idea of how to do this, but good luck!

Hmmm, if I had to make a stab, I’d say you might really want to just do them as separate wp blogs on the same site — especially if you want the folder breakdowns.
Otherwise, definitely a LOT of customizing the PHP, as you’re looking for some rather extreme use of the system.
Others, feel free to chime in! ??
=d

I have a couple of questions, actually. What is the advantage of having separate templates and a file folder for every category? As far as the templates go, the combination of a default template and a style sheet or two gives you enormous flexibility. Multiple templates just sounds like a lot of work, and when you want changes to the site, that means changing mutiple templates. It’s far easier to add new CSS layouts that re-design and re-test entirely new templates. I realise that no single tool or program is going to suit everybody, but I think that one of the strengths of WP is its simplicity.
Just my 2 cents.
Craig.

Thanks for your response.
But the real crux of my requirement is the ability to set different options for different categories. Supposing I have two categories viz: Book-Reviews and Nuggets, I want each of them show different number of posts on a paged-posts set-up. And the “Previous Posts”, “Next-Posts” link must resolve to the files of each category distinctly. Right now (I use b2 now), I have one category called Rants which have longer posts so I want to show only 10 in each page and show the rest in other pages and so on; and since the other category Nuggets has shorter posts, I want to show 15 or 20 posts in a page. This is not possible presently with b2.
I think I have made this clear.
I think this kind of thing can be achieved in MT, but I want to use it with WP. If it can be done with MT , why not with WP which uses PHP which I understand has greater customisability!!
Please help!
Cheers!
S.K

I think it might be possible, if you had separate templates that specified in the header to only display posts from one category, and specified which template you wanted in your links. So, instead of linking to ‘index.php?cat=1’ you’d link to ‘nuggets.php’ or whatever. And ‘nuggets.php’ would have ‘$cat=1’ in the header. In b2, you could set the number of posts to be displayed by inserting
< ? php $posts = x; ? >
on the first line of the template, but I haven’t tried that in WP.
Your main issue would be archives, because I can’t see how you’d be able to direct the links to different templates from there. You’d have to hack the PHP, and I don’t know enough about that to tell you whether it’s possible.