I'm pretty happy with the category tree I set up for my blog, but it's going to get longer, just like the by month archives. So I went and made all this stuff collapsible. I use some client side scripting to make the ul containers visible or invisible, which seems to be working out. I like it, anyway.

But ... this all runs in the browser, so it doesn't hold state. Collapse and expand things to your taste, go to a different page, and it resets to how I defaulted it. It would be great if I could make all the sidebar items remember how users leave them.

I'm a lot better in asp than php, and I haven't done that much wordpress hacking. Anybody have any ideas how I might go about this, working within the framework of wp? I can set the cookies using javascript no problem ... I can even read them and set the right state for the collapsible regions after the document loads ... but I'd really like to set that on the server side, so people don't get flicker when they navigate around my blog.

I don't have your answer, dude, but you get an Unknown Runtime Error on your Javascript in IE7. Just wanted to point that out, that's all.

Nicely done with the category tree! How'd you do that?

I haven't used it personally, but this plugin may help out (For collapsing categories):
http://wingingit.cjbehm.com/collapseit

Not sure if cookies is a WP issue, though there is some explanation here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Cookies

I've been trying to figure out that IE scripting error ... when I pull up the rendered source and look at the line and column it complains about, there's an opening div tag, but nothing to do with script...

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

Nicely done with the category tree! How'd you do that?

Thanks! Categories have the ability to be a hierarchy out of the box ... it's just no one uses that functionality. I went to the manage categories page and assigned most of them a parent, which is shamefully easy. Then I set the template to give each unordered list an ID and toggle it's display style.

I got the cookies to work client side; haven't tried making the server send down the proper state yet.