thumbnails in recent posts
 

I'm over my head. Using latest Atahualpa and WordPress. What's the easiest way to get thumbnails to appear under or beside headlines in a "recent posts" column? I need also to control that "recent posts" would begin after 6 or 7 full posts in the main column. I've messed around / messed up with various plugins already:

Here's what I'm working on: http://www.squaredealdesign.com/wordpress/

So far I'm left with an image title below posts with images, but no image. It's the closest I've gotten!
This is with thumbnails-for-excerpts, and recent-posts plugins. I suspect I'm messing up the configurations, but for the life of me I'm stumped!

already tried: wp-post-thumbnail, wp-choose-thumb, visual-recent-posts, too....

Newsflash: there seems to be some directory issues with the thumbnails-- I get this message in "Excerpt View:"

Warning: imagecreatefromjpeg(/home/content/j/i/m/jimkend/html/wordpress/wp-admin/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/sanford.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/content/j/i/m/jimkend/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/thumbnail-for-excerpts/thumbnailforexcerpts.php on line 129

Anyone know how to solve this?
Desperate in New York,
Jim

wordpress/wp-admin/wp-content

It's looking into a wrong, non-existant directory for the image, because wp-admin/ is being added to the image file path.

thanks for your reply!

I finally found a solution myself, though:

in the "Recent Posts" plugin controls under
settings>recent posts>output template>
type in:
<li>{image:0:260:?}{link}</li>
"260"px is my column width, and "?" just makes the height scale to whatever. Who knows why the "0" is there, but it works.

Now I just have to find a way for the center column to stop after 7 or so articles.
Jim