Making lastup or toprated work more like {sys_menu} or {gallery}

[Techmaster]

I'm trying to skin my site to make it look unique, but it seems like you're pretty much limited to editing a header/footer, and changing the order of what appears in the middle, or whether items appear or not.  I want to make some sidebars to my gallery, and have them display things like latest uploads or top rated pictures.  I've been searching for hours on here, have tried a few different things, and am out of ideas.  I even tried using the coppermine fetch thing, but the problem is that is made for use outside of coppermine.  This is still inside coppermine.

If there was a way to copy the code that displays the last uploads, for example, into my theme.php as a new function...maybe I could somehow call that function by adding in some code to intercept {lastup}.  This would really be great if I can somehow pull this off, can anybody please help?  Thanks!