How would I go about removing the K2 Sidebar Manager?

Have you tried asking this question on the K2 forum itself since the question seems very K2 specific.
What plugins are you having problems with?

For some reason, the administrator there has disabled registering– I guess they have all the members they’re willing to take?

I’ve tried emailing the contact address for that site, but have received no reply. I thought this might be too K2-specific, but wasn’t sure where else to go.

I guess I can sit on my hands for another couple days, but it’s been a few days, and I’m on a project, and need to find some sort of workaround.

You’re right, responses from the forum can be a tad sporadic, due to workloads and some other projects ongoing.
You might try getting the most up to date nightlies – you never know.
What happens when you uncheck the SBM box and go back to using widgets?

I’ll try that.

My issue is with the My Custom Widgets plugin– when I put a widget universally on the site, it doesn’t have a problem.

But when I create a widget on just my home page, it disappears. I’m still new to all this, and I’m trying to parse out the PHP and see if I can modify a statement or something to make it work, but I keep getting the suspicion that the K2 is interfering with it… Possibly just because I can’t find anything anywhere about people using this plugin with this theme, and because K2 is hacked together the way it is…

Plus it’s being hacked together the way it is means the code is a lot less simple than in other WP themes, and it seems like it might not be the best theme to futz with as a PHP beginner… At least without a bit of guidance.

Anyway, I’ll wait a bit, and keep trying to figure out the PHP while I do so.

Thanks for being so friendly and helpful, though– WP is so deceptively simple that when problems come up, I keep getting really stuck for a while. I put my site together in about a day, and I’ve spent probably forty hours trying to fix around ten things that were buggy or fuxord.

I was asked to do this project because the regular WP guy is overworked, and I was initially nonplussed, ’cause the out-of-the-box functionality of WordPress is so simple. I’ve been shocked at how steep the learning curve gets when you go beyond “put it up, throw on a theme.” The CSS can get funny because of the way the data’s organized, blah blah blah.

While I love how powerful and cool WP is, some days it just makes me miss HTML.

You can find the SBM php file in the “css” folder of the latest build of K2 (where the style sheet can be found also). I’m unsure about your use of the term ‘hack’ when talking about K2, it’s a sophisticated set up, very customizable, and still work in progress; built by the designers of the original Kubrick theme (K2, geddit?) You can see how the SBM has evolved in Habari, which dispenses with the WP interface altogether.If K2 isn’t for you, you could try out something like WP Themer Kit, and devise your own theme.