Best way to categorize/populate a magazine style layout

Question

I'm taking the reigns of an existing Wordpress site that has a magazine-style home page with sections for featured articles, upcoming events, different categories of articles, etc.

Currently, these fields are populated with a hodgepodge of different taxonomy - the page uses categories, tags, and sticky posts to correctly populate the content.

Using all three seems a big excessive. What's the best method of categorizing and populating a magazine style layout. Just being driven by the category of the article, etc? Or are their plugins/methods for the editors to directly choose specifically which article appears where.

Answer 1

I'd use a bunch of widget areas to build up a home page like that. Register some extra sidebars (in this case they don't actually have to be 'sidebars', they can be any size/shape) and then create a widget or widgets that can list posts from any category or list sticky posts etc...

• Registering Sidebars
• Widgets API