Category Image

Hi there. Sorry for dupes.

I'm helping to administer a news site that used to run on postnuke. We're getting back on our feet after a server crash and taking the opportunity to switch to Drupal. So far, very happy with it.

However, I really miss a feature of postnuke that Drupal doesn't seem to have built in: the automatic creation of graphical tags for categories on news posts.

To clarify: we had, say 20 different topics, and all the news (blog posts) on the frontpage were assigned to one category or another. Then, at the top right of the summary on the frontpage, and in the extended content, the assigned topic's graphic would automatically show up. This added a great deal of visual interest to what otherwise would be a fairly boring layout without asking anything but a mouse click from our users.

Drupal doesn't seem to do this. It seems like it should be in the Taxonomy function, but I can't find it. Am I wrong? I've been exploring, and it seems like maybe the Taxonomy_image module will do this, but I can't completely penetrate the techspeak to be sure, and it seems like it will require more php and css knowledge than I have (next to none). I don't know where to cut and paste all that code in my theme, and I don't know what the code will do.

I guess what I'm asking for is 1.) confirmation that I'm on the right track, not missing something obvious and 2.) for someone to further simplify the instructions found here under "Summary Guide to taxonomy_image": http://drupal.org/node/64215#comment-177566 . I follow just fine until steps 7-9. But then... Why do I need to paste code that will override the module I just installed? WHERE is "the place where you want the taxonomy image to appear" in node.tpl.php? (I want to do this with all blog posts, audio, video etc... it'd also be cool to allow more than one topic graphic per post, a la slashdot). Where is the css I "customize to suit my needs?"

Why isn't this easier?

Thanks in advance for the help,
Rafael