Modifying existing WP theme Deadline from ThemeForest

Hi all,

I have a WordPress theme modified from Theme Forest that needs some PHP/CSS tweaks. I use this theme as part of my works website (a secondary school) to great effect. Over the past month I’ve noticed some elements I’d like changed/modified however the level of coding is way above my head. I’m hoping – with some assistance – you friendly folk may be able to guide me on how to get things working the way I’d like but also, more importantly, help me learn more about WP.

1) At present we have a static background. I’d love to get a random background instead, picking images up from a specific folder, to change the look of the site every time it is loaded or every day. At present the site background is controlled by CSS. Is there any easy way to introduce a folder of background images that the CSS could randomly select every-time the site loads?

2) We have 1 headline post showing, which is our main news item. Unfortunately it’s the most recent post. This causes problems because if I add other less important ‘news’, the last updated piece would take the headlines place. Ideally I’d like to tag certain posts with Headline and get only those to display in the Headlines place (kind of similar to the Featured news area we have). Below you can see some of the code which calls the Featured post. Is it easy to add in the command to only display certain tagged posts?

<?php /* show posts tagged featured */
$tz_featured_posts = new WP_Query(); $tz_featured_posts->query('tag=featured&posts_per_page=' . $tz_featured_number . ''); ?>
<?php while ($tz_featured_posts->have_posts()) : $tz_featured_posts->the_post(); ?>

3) On our homepage there are 3 areas for news to appear, the Headline area, the Featured news area and the Recent news area. On numerous occasions the recent news area gets clogged with posts already displayed in the Headline or Featured news space. I’d like recent news to exclude certain categories – or tagged posts – so this content isn’t duplicated. The recent news is being called like so <?php include( TEMPLATEPATH . '/includes/recent-posts.php' ); ?>. Within that recent-posts page I can’t seem to find an option to exclude certain categories or post tags. Would anybody know how to add this?

Any assistance would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance! Chris