On my home page and in my archives, I use a custom category template to display asides and news articles. This is very easy to do and it only takes a couple seconds of work to create custom category templates in any WordPress theme.

The first step is to add the following to your current theme’s index.php loop after the line that looks like < ?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>, but before any other code.

< ?php $cat_temp = cat_loop();?>
	< ?php if($cat_temp && is_numeric($cat_temp)){?>
		< ?php include('loops/cat_'.$cat_temp.'.php');?>
	< ?php }else{ ?>

Then add } just before the line endwhile.

The next step is to add the following to your theme’s functions.php file (you may have to create a file with the same name):

function cat_loop(){
	global $blog_id,$post, $wp_version;
		if($wp_version >= 2.3){
			global $object_term_cache;
			$array = $object_term_cache[$blog_id][$post->ID]['category'];
		}else{
			global $category_cache;
			$array = $category_cache[$blog_id][$post->ID];
		}
		while (list($cat) = each($array)) {
			if(file_exists(dirname(__FILE__).'/loops/cat_'.$cat.'.php')){
				return $cat;
			}
		}
	}

This can be modified to look at author’s also.