sidebar troubles, taxonomy trouble

  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.