One of the fan-diddly-tastic things about writing your own CMS that makes no attempt at a front end; is how quickly you can wack in any sort of custom doo-dad onto the said absent thus handbuilt front end. For example, i grabbed my trusty +1 xhtml editing tool and dropped in a topic image on the static test verison of this site. Thusly contented and somewhat proud of myself, i set about retrieving free images from www.sxc.hu that would make up the plethora of suitably random and interesting topic icons. Having achieved my purposes in both fitting out the layout to my tastes, and finding icons to match. I once again took up my trusty +1 xhtml editing tool ! Coding the minimal php needed to drop the list of icons (which i entered by hand somewhere in the process) from the europa_public database and swiftly into an array to be conveniently retrieved later in the news page for display. In a furious blaze of typing, cutting and pasting and other heroic moves, then merged the slight css2 changes, then added an extra line in the news display loop to put the images on the page... then viola! Happy little topic images!