createerrormsg

Really good ideas, eric. I don’t plan on changing my categories very often, and even if I do, having to manually change the absolute URLS in two or three files (actually, I could require_once() it in from a text file) is a small price to pay for the flexibility of using different templates. It’s certainly better than having to dump WP altogether and write my own CMS.
Thanks a LOT for the help. I’ll give your trick a try this weekend and post back on how it works!

This gives me three templates – one for the home page, one for category listings and one for posts.

The problem here is that ONLY the homepage uses the original index.php now, any other link is passed through indiv.php. It’s a great solution if you just want a new template for individual posts. Unfortunately, I’m looking to make a template for each archive (category). Thanks, though. If all else fails, I’ll restructure the IA of the site and use this.

two different templates, both called index.php but in different subdirectories

eric, were all the function include files in both folders? In other words, to make your hack work, did you have two folders containing all the WP files, differently hacked with relative URLs?
You idea seems plausible, and even extendable to use more than just two folders. The difficulty would be getting the category permalink in the first folder’s pages to point to the second folder’s pages…i.e., how to make the two different templates interact?

Strictly speaking, the file that places elements (read ‘stuff’) on your page is the file index.php in the main wordpress folder. This file contains the HTML markup, with intermingled PHP tags, that peices the page together.
The wp-layout.css file is a cascading style sheet, and is used to juice up and alter the layout of the index.php file. With settings in the css file you can move the location of page elements, as well as alter the appearance of your page by changing things like background colors, borders, font types, sizes and colors, etc. It is the two files–wp-layout.css and index.php–working in tandem that ultimately layout the page.
If you want to delve into the wp-layout.css file, it’s a great idea and totally doable–css files are where you get real fine tune control over page appearance–but there’s a learning curve.
A great place to go to start learning to use CSS is the WebMasterWorld.com forum. There are many, many, many experts there and we all–advanced and learners alike–are eager to help out whenever we can. It’s a great place to get started.

Thanks for the advice. I’m not having a problem, though, with making or modifying templates. Modifying index.php isn’t a problem. Creating a brand new template for WP isn’t problem. Making WP apply that template to permalinks
is a problem, because it won’t.
Your idea of making a seperate stylesheet for different “pages”, using the same template is interesting, but unfortunately, wont work. My goal is to have each category get it’s own template, with it’s own static links and permanent content…not doable with CSS alone.