Hello everyone,

I'm fairly new to coding, but I've been watching a lot of tutorials, many by Chris (which are awesome by the way!). I am trying to write my first function, and it works... sort of. What I want to do is create a function with a parameter of a category and number of posts to display, and then have that function display that particular category in the way it is marked up within the function (the html and whatnot). I have some meta data within a custom field in each post that I want to pull and display (an image to be exact). The function will display the text from the category and the number of posts I give it, but the image wont display. When I do it without putting it in a function, I can get the image, but not within the function.

I've used get_post_meta($post->ID, 'banner-image', true) and set it to a variable. Then I try to call that variable, but nothing comes out. I've been working on this for weeks, and nothing. I've looked on the internet, and still nothing. I don't know if I just don't know what I'm doing and missing something, or if it just can't be done. I hope that someone can give me some ideas to work with. (BTW: this is a wordpress site)

 <?php 
function retry($catposts) {
  query_posts($catposts);
    if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
        echo '<div id="new-lectures" class="post">';
          echo '<//h2><//a href="'; the_permalink(); 
          echo '">'; the_title(); 
          echo '<///a><///h2>';
          
          $banner = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'banner-image');
          echo '<//img src="' . bloginfo('template_directory') . $banner .  '"/>'; 
          
          echo '<//div class="content">';
          echo the_content(); 
          echo '<///div>'; 
          echo '<///div>'; 
    endwhile; 
  wp_reset_query();
endif;
}
?>

Thanks Doc for the help with getting the code to show up, but I had to use a TON of backslash marks to get html tags to show up properly. I probably just dont know what Im doing. But, either way, this is the code Im using, minus all the backslashes (except when needed to close a tag, of course).