Andy Chase

The Sliding Doors of CSS has been around for more than three years, but until now the pretty-tabs problem is one I’ve never had to solve with modern tools. (The last time I cracked this nut was working on the Edmunds.com redesign which never saw the light of day in 1999, and back then it was a sliced image and nested table nightmare.)

The basic solution in the Sliding Doors article is very, very clever in the kind of way that gives me great satisfaction.

I seem to have a knack for discovering the limitations of content management software just when I have committed enough time and energy to learning it that I won’t back out.

In this case, I thought it would be nice to preserve the ‘Archives’ sidebar item on the Explosive Logorrhea, Music, and Lutherie pages, but have the menu (and its links) filter by the category you’re currently viewing. A feature that you would expect any reasonable set of template tags to accommodate, right?

Not WordPress 2.0.4, or any available plugins that I could find. Fortunately, somebody else already solved this problem. The solution involves modifying the WordPress core source code, but it’s manageable - follow the notes after the initial post, too:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/69776