i want to create Title categories on my left sidebar, that aren't links - just titles.

Just like WP already gives you "Categories", "Recent Posts", "Archives" - under which we create our categories and subcategories.

Example:

CATEGORIES (title, bolded, no link)
March
April
May June

ARCHIVES (title, bolded, no link)
January 2009
February 2009
March 2009

how do i create my own titles? thanks!!

Well if you want to create your own, just use the text widget and add whatever you want. You can even put in html (for links) if you want

i thought about that, but then how do i create categories to go under the new title (that i've created with the text widget). that title won't appear in the Categories page for me to order as parent/child categories...

when you say titles, do you mean the POST titles? Do you want a list of the post titles or are you asking how to change teh word 'Category' to something else and the word 'archive' to something else?

If you want to change teh word - go to the WP widgets page, open the sidebar in question, open the widget and you should be able to type in your own title.

i am talking about changing the name (eg: Categories to something else)

the problem is that

a) the original "Categories" name does not appear in my widget side bar (it appears on the published page, but not here in the back end in the left sidebar)

b) when i add an extra Category widget to the sidebar, i can change the title, but it pulls the original categories that i listed. the whole purpose of renaming the Title is so that i can have different sections (as you would with an online store...for eg:

Toys
(now list your categories)

Books
(now list your categories)

Clothes
(now list your categories)

i want to be able to name each new title and then only feature the categories i want to feature.

hope that made sense!

ok, have you added any widgets to the sidebar? If you never have, there are 5 that wordpress puts in as a default and you can't customize them. Once you add a widget in, you can customize it and the default ones go away.

So add the category widget to the sidebar and see if you can chnage the name.

right - as i mentioned above, that's what i did.

i pulled a Category widget into the sidebar and renamed it. the problem is that it pulls the same code. so even though i rename it, it then places all the categories i've already created under the original "Categories" name and places them into the "new" renamed Categories.

What version of Atahualpa, WP and PHP?
Can you list a url so I can see this?

Atahualpa 3.4.1

WordPress 2.8.4

not sure about PHP

only downloaded everything less than 2 weeks ago

Can you list our website url (address) so I can look at the page

sure - thanks

http://omekmikra.com

i added a re-named category widget to the left side bar so you can see what happens. it just pulls the same categories from the original group of categories (although the order that i have them in through the "My Category Order" widget gets messed up when i create a new title

Ok after reading this again - is this what you want
You have several categories :Books, Toys, Clothes
you want to have sub-categories under each
books->fiction, nonfiction, biography
toys->board games, card games, sports
clothing->mens, womens, children

now what you want in the sidebar is three sections

BOOKS <- NOT a link
fiction <- link
nonfiction <- link
biography <- link

TOYS <- NOT a link
board games <- link
card games <- link
sports <- link

CLOTHING <- NOT a link
mens <- link
womens <- link
children <- link

Here is how you can do this
1) get and activate exec-php plugin (http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/)
2) setup your categories and subcategoried
3) get the ID of each parent category (dashboard->Posts->Categories->Edit then look at the HTML address in the BROWSER window - the last part is '..&cat_ID=4' - in this case '4' is the ID of this category
4) Add a text widget for each parent category and make the title the name of the parent (i.e 'BOOKS', 'TOYS', "CLOTHING'
5) add the following code to the 'text' part of the widget making sure the number matches the parent category ID

<?php echo wp_list_cats('child_of=4'); ?>

That should do it...if this is what you want.