CentristRants.org is a work in progress. The Multiple Columns By Category WordPress template is a hack job at best. I will be working toward moving it (and a supporting plug-in?) into standards based compliance over time.

Anybody who wants this stuff can have it “as is.” Any support will be on a catch-as-catch-can, co-development basis – i.e. I expect as many or more answers as I do questions. Discussion of this development will be held in the in the commentary of this posting.

At launch, CentristRants.org suffers from the following known defects:

1. Total violations of the WordPress Loop by additional queries to retrieve posts for the Left, Center and Right columns separately. This prevents the home page from being recognized as the home page. Instead, the sidebar refers to the 3_Right archive. Also, this forces me to set the number of posts to show to 999 so I can be sure that some posts from each column will be displayed and because the links to previous entries and next entries do not work if and when they occur.
2. The “stars on blue” background on the left and the “red stripe” background on the right do not fill the entire area within the containing division.
3. The template is not generic yet. It’s hard coded for the columns I want. In the future, it will be soft coded to treat all categories that match the name pattern ._* where . is 0-9 and * is a legal tag in style.css (such as #* == #Left) as input to the multiple columns.

Hey, it’s good enough to get started. Comments and suggestions welcome.