I am creating a new site and my client has asked if she can put different content in the sidebar for each page. It appears that Atahualpa only allows two sidebars to be defined, one for the right side and one for the left side. So one cannot define an arbitrary number of sidebards and switch between them using conditional code without going into major hacking of Atahualpa, which I don't want to do.

I know that in Atahualpa one can choose to turn on or off each sidebar for certain types of Pages, but that doesn't help with this particular challenge.

My workaround at the moment is to use a single sidebar but put in multiple Text widgets, and control the visibility of each widget using the Widget Logic plugin. This works OK, but it seems a bit cumbersome.

I have one Text widget in the sidebar for each Page on the site, and a conditional statement in Widget Logic for each widget. For example, "is_page('Contact')" will show that particular widget's content only on the Contact page.

Are there any other ways to accomplish this while using Atahualpa?

If you want to use both sidebars, you could check out Slayers Custom Widgets. It allows you to specify which widget you want where.

http://www.thaslayer.com/2008/10/16/...-widgets-v-10/