Old School Function hacking for Corporate Blog

Hi all, hope you can help me.

I’m customizing WordPress for a Corporate Blog. I need an old-school function hack to put Press Releases on the Sidebar of Every page.

So obviously the Loop conditional won’t do it for me (since it has to be page-independent, I have a number of static pages), I need to roll my own function with queries and the like. No biggie. I figure to clone an existing function and have it grab the title and first few lines of text out of the DB (fortunately I’ve got phpMyAdmin installed and I’ve got a test server for this). Put some div tags on it and I’m done.

However, I’m having trouble figuring out where I can put my custom function. I’ve taken the default template, copied it and renamed it and hacked it up quite a bit CSS (style.css) and PHP-wise (sidebar.php and header.php and footer.php).

I certainly don’t want to put the function straight into the hacked template file sidebar.php, but there are a plethora of function files in wp-includes directory … and I’m uncertain which function file I should use.

I am using PHP5 and MySQL 5 and WordPress 2.05.

Appreciate any pointers.