I'm having several problems with the category tree in the left margin. Just so you can see what I've done the address is www.creativepartyblog.com.

1. I know I edited the verbage of the main category to "Party Themes" I can't find that again. Can you tell me where that was?

2. Can you have more than one top level category like the one that I have now entitiled "Party Themes"? I have gone to admin/posts/categories/ and added category names with no parent category and that's not working. I have the following as top level categories: "birthday party breakdowns", "Theme Ideas" and "resources." You will see that theme ideas show up in the list but don't look any different than subcategories that I've included. The others in the column are suppose to be subcategories.......does this make sense?

Thank you in advance
Holly

If I can't have two completely different category listings, how do I remove certain categories/pages from showing in the left margin?

To indent sub items set check the "Show Hierarchy" checkbox inside the Category widget

You can use the default Categories widget multiple times but it will always display all categories.

To display several instances showing different categories, install and use multiple instances of the PHP code widget, drop a few of them into the sidebar, click on their Edit links to give each one a title, such as "Party Themes", and put this into each one

<ul>
<?php wp_list_categories('show_count=1&title_li=&include =3,7,22'); ?>
</ul>

3,7,22 means display posts of categories with the ID's 3, 7 and 22.

Put the numbers in ascending order here. Look up the ID's of categories at WP Admin -> Posts -> Categories -> Edit -> Watch browser status bar at bottom of browser window for "...&cat_ID=XX"

See http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_...ist_categories for more configuration options of wp_list_categories

Thank you so much for this. This is the kind of thing I get left out in the dark about when I don't know PHP or HTML. Only enough to get in trouble.

I'm now having problems in the admin side of the widgets page. I drag and drop a widget to the left sidebar and in preview it's there but in the admin side, the widget doesn't show up so I can't edit it.

Is this a wp blog question?

Well, I'm learning how to work around it. I have to clear out all widgets in that margin and then put the ones I want back in.