I want a bunch of titles down the left sidebar that pop open to a page (or post or whatever) that has both content/stories I upload as well as a community (forum) part on the page where members who login can post. Same for the top header bar.

Any advice on how to do this? Categories v. pages? Buddy Press Plug-in?

Thanks!!!!

Your going to have to do a bunch of experimentation with various plugins and such. I can't think of a simple step by step for this and believe it's going to require familiarity with the various plugins to see how they can work together.

Thank you - was afraid that was going to be the answer! Will give it a go to see if I can cobble it together....if not I'll search for expert help.

One thing I was going to try is to do an inside sidebar that is page specific and put my content there....I can get that set up, but can't figure out how to enter content to it. Sounds like a widget is the answer!

Again, appreciate your time, and if anyone else has any ideas, please let me know!

You are right about a widget for content. You add text to a text widget and there are others that grab the content you want to show.

What I like to do is just search through the plugins at wordpress.org and play with various one I find.

To only have them show on particular pages you can use other plugins such as Widget Logic of Display Widgets.

Hope that helps.