Sidebar problems

[DeadSeraphim]

I'm working on a custom skin for a forum (the code, at least, I'm collaborating with a professional designer friend), and I'm wondering if there's anyway to do something like the following in the sidebar:

I've looked at a few plugins/products that could do it for a more standard theme, with essentially the same HTML as the stock, but the HTML in our theme is drastically different, and the stock-standard hardcoded HTML just doesn't work. I was wondering if anyone could give me some tips and pointers for:

* Displaying announcements outside of forums, like on the image (multiple announcements)
* A featured thread solution that doesn't involve manually editting the theme every time we want to change it
* An RSS solution so we can display the podcasts (podcast history link isn't as important). I've an idea this can be done within vBulletin, without ++++ing around with plugins, but I've started using the software literally this week, so I'm still on training wheels, so to speak.

Thanks for any help you may provide. =)