<Java EE developer, new to JQuery, developing personal photography site>
I have a question about being able to interact with content inside "panels", and whether they should be iframes, normal divs or whatever.
My site isn't live anywhere yet, but it's pretty simple to describe.
My photography-based site consists of one page, with a fullscreen background image, and several left-hand-side navigation links to various galleries, each of which is a separate jquery gallery (prettyPhoto implementation).
Under the gallery links in the left hand nav, there's another link to my wordpress blog. What I'd like to happen is to have the WordPress blog become visible when this link is clicked, and the blog should appear on the same page in a sort of panel. (This is not really a question about how to integrate WordPress content into an existing page, as I've pretty much got that working, although so far it's just content with no styling). So far I have it opening just in a div via a jquery toggle fade, and it looks ok, and doing it like this I've got no page refreshes.
The problem is that if there are any links inside the blog panel (e.g. links to previous posts etc), these links will take the browser focus completely away from this page and we have a full server refresh, and I'm no longer looking at my blog content inside the nice div over the top of my lovely background image. We've now been redirected to my blog, which is not what I want. I know some people style their WordPress blog to look like their site but I don't want to do that - that seems a crappy way to do it. What I want is for the full blog interaction to take place within that blog panel on my first page. Ultimately if I can figure out how to just take the main WordPress styled content and dump it completely inside then (assuming I can find a decent enough WP theme) I won't even have to style the content.
Ignoring the WP-specific stuff, I guess it's just about whether I can have clickable links within that panel but have only that panel refresh....Is that possible? I'm pretty sure an iframe will do it... Are there any other possibilities? Are there jquery implementations/modifications of iframe which might be more pleasing to the eye? Any other ideas?