Complicated views layout I need to display part of the exposed form in my page's sidebar, and the rest of the form and content in the $content area. There's really no good way that I can find to do this. I sort of got it to show up in a way by making a "block" view with "exposed form" set and then trying to only show the part that i needed through .tpl files. The problem is that then, when the submit button is clicked (the submit button is in the $content area), then the filters that are in the sidebar are not taken into account.

Ideas?
You are facing the limitations og HTML itself. All of the form fields has to be in the same form to make it work. If you split them up in two forms it will not work as the browser will see it as two different forms.

A workaround would be to render the entire form both places, hide unwanted fields with CSS and use JavaScript to sync values between the forms.