Flexible drupal content-types Okay it might sound a little weird for me to ask a question about dynamic content-types seeing as that's what drupal is all about.. however I'm wondering if there is a preferred method to do a page template that will allow you to add hooks in to activate modules within the page.

for example

if I had a simple 2 column layout w/ main content and right rail next to eachother. would it be feasible to create a template that would take an argument (lets say something you can put in the description) like "$rightRail = twitter;" and then the page renders w/ a twitter module in the right rail?

I hope that makes sense. I'm running into an issue where we have a bunch of pages that look similar, except the rightrail has a very different information in terms of modules, etc... and I wanted to see what the best way to unify my template would be.

Right now the team is creating a new content type and page template for each type... and I don't like that.

thanks guys.
I am thinking you are wanting to learn more about blocks.  You could, for example, have a block that output an iframe/html/whatever widget.  In the blocks hooks, you can use all sorts of information to decide when to display it it, eg what page/url, what type of node, etc.  So, for example with twitter, you could grab information/fields from the node it is being displayed next to and customize it appropriately.