I ran into this template that I liked, but wanted to change the header image. I changed it, uploaded it and refreshed the page, but NOTHING changed. I spent a good 5 minutes on this before checking the css to see what was going on. Instead of finding a path to an image in the css for the background, I found a path to a file named rotate.php. The script was written by Matt Mullenweg (http://photomatt.net/scripts/randomimage) and seemed simple enough to me. What I liked about this script is that it didn’t require managing a bunch of images. If you want an image you simply stick it in a predefined directory and point to that directory.

I decided to rewrite this in coldfusion and within a few minutes I had a working. It is rather simple. Define your folder, define your extensions and define the url path to the folder and you are done. You will find the code below.

<cftry>
<!---
created by Andrew Alba >> http://www.albawebstudio.com
This will grab images from specified folder and randomly display them. You will only need to modify the three variables below
--->
<!--- Insert the absolute path (with trailing slash) to the images.
"/home/mysite/public_html/images/" or "/www/mysite/web/images/random/"
If the images are in the same directory as this script you can leave it as shown file
--->
	<cfset folder = "#GetDirectoryFromPath(GetBaseTemplatePath())#" />
	<!--- List of allowed extensions (separate with space) --->
	<cfset ext = "jpg jpeg png gif" />
	<!--- Insert the URL to the folder that contains the images --->
	<cfset url_image_path = "http://www.homeshq.com/gfx/promotion/" />
	<!--- do not edit below this point --->
	<!--- lets get the contents of the folder --->
	<cfdirectory directory="#folder#" action="list" name="filelisting" />
	<!--- pull just file names out of the list --->
	<cfset fileList = "" />
	<cfoutput query="filelisting">
		<cfif filelisting.type is "file">
			<cfset fileList = listappend(fileList,filelisting.name) />
		</cfif>
	</cfoutput>
	<!--- now we can create a new list of files --->
	<cfset new_fileList = "">
	<cfloop list="#fileList#" index="i" delimiters=",">
	<!--- lets use our list of extensions to weed out the files types we don't want --->
	<!--- now we grab just the extension --->
		<cfset file_ext = listlast(i,".") />
		<!--- if it finds file_ext is acceptable as per ext then it adds it to the array --->
		<cfif listfindnocase(ext,file_ext," ")>
			<cfset new_fileList = listappend(new_fileList,i) />
		</cfif>
	</cfloop>
	<!--- now to choose random number from the list --->
	<cfset image_file = listgetat(new_fileList,randrange(1,listlen(new_fileList),"SHA1PRNG"),",") />
	<cflocation url="#url_image_path##image_file#?rand=#randrange(1,999999999,"SHA1PRNG")#" addtoken="no">
	<cfcatch type="any"></cfcatch>
</cftry>