Sitewide Navigation Mod

[Hubris]

I'm working on forum code for a site with an articles section as well as a set of rather extensive forums, and I'd like to be able to set it up so that articles are made as forum posts in a category called "Site Content", with individual boards within the category representing various sections that site content could be found in.

it is easy enough to hardcode the main page so that the entire category is invisible, but where I'm running into trouble is that I want each board within Site Content to appear at the top of every page, creating a nice little site navigation system. this code can be embedded in index.template.php, but on pages where $context is not defined with 'categories' the navigation not only fails to appear but breaks the rest of the page.

so I'm trying to figure out how best to deal with this in a forum-wide context. I've tried creating a new global variable ($navigation) to house the information but I'm not sure where exactly the variable should be defined and where the database should be loaded into it. if anyone could help me figure this one out I'd appreciate it.

[Hubris]

update on this: I've set up the forums in question to always show using a separate theme that's much more minimalistic and better-suited to a mainsite sort of thing. so all that is working but the navigation is still screwed up where I don't want it to be. any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Hubris]

sorry, but I gotta bump this one last time... the thing is still giving me grief and I'm still clueless about how to even begin the hack. I know enough PHP to take on the frontend, but my SQL knowledge is lacking.