sidebar troubles, taxonomy trouble

Question

can you help me with two things :

• i have different movies, to classify into different "genre", should i use "taxonomies" or the already built in "category"? is taxonomy more appropriate in this case? i saw so many tutorials about taxonomies, but also some website only using categories for several things, what should i do?

• i'm trying to show my personal sidebar, so i built "mysidebar" into "functions.php",it is editable in my dashboard, but it doesn't work when i try to show it with :

get_sidebar ('mysidebar');

why?

i tried another way, it works with :

if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('mysidebar') ) : dynamic_sidebar( 'mysidebar' ); ?>

isn't 'get_sidebar' the method to "call" the sidebar?

Ok so now i would like to customize my sidebar, so i created a php page named "sidebar-mysidebar.php" and i just echoed some text, that is not shown, could you tell me how to put some text with the code, and not only through the dashboard?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

1. Categories are a hierarchical taxonomy. Tags are simply a non-hierarchical taxonomy. If you don't have a use for categories otherwise, then use them for genre. If you have a need for them, then create more taxonomies as needed for additional classification/categorization, etc..

2. get_sidebar('mysidebar'); is for calling a sidebar template file, in your case sidebar-mysidebar.php. dynamic_sidebar('name'); is for calling the sidebars you've defined for the admin panel in your functions.php file. within your main template file you'd typically use get_sidebar() to load your sidebar template, then within that template call your dynamic_sidebar(), as well as add whatever additional text or default sidebar if the dynamic sidebar doesn't exist.