[Mooff]

@Scalemotorcars
I haven't looked into it.
The options are:
- using fitting images as article images, which do not need to be resized (delete the resizing part then)
- resizing the images via CSS (might break the nivo slider transition effects, not sure about that one) - this also would mean deleting the resizing code
- cURL, which does involve reading through the cURL documentation or googleing for "replace fOpen via cURL"

@GamersChallenge
you can remove echo "$output"; since you are using the template system.
Then in the template you need to write {vb:raw output} somewhere, and that should be it.