Multi-level Menu Plugin

[DawnB]

I'm sorry, I'm not a programmer, so that anything that requires"programming" is elusive :0).

I'm not understanding the functions.php and how to add components. Honestly, I don't even know the protocol for creating the page functions.php. I took a stab at it and ended up messing up my design - I'm sure it is because I have no idea what I am doing . . .

I created a page that had this in it:

function get_content($page){
$path = "data/pages";
$thisfile = @file_get_contents('data/pages/'.$page.'.xml');
$data = simplexml_load_string($thisfile);
echo stripslashes(htmlspecialchars_decode($data->content, ENT_QUOTES));;
}

I saved that page as functions.php and uploaded it to my theme sub-directory, and then I called it using:

<?php get_content('bottompart'); ?>

But that didn't work and messed up the design.

I'm sorry to ask, but can anyone give me some direction on this, have no idea what I'm doing. My biggest frustration is that this seems to be geared more toward the programmer / developer and those of us who "design" are going to struggle. I really just want a simple CMS to offer clients (Joomla was too robust for small sites).

Thanks for putting up with my questions.

Dawn