Reusing user accounts and excerpt ability

[Boot Liquor]

Okay, been seeing more and more use of vBulletin on my favorite sites (most recently on 43Folders.com) and am close to committing the money (and time) to migrate from phpBB. I do have a couple of non-standard things I would like to do with the product, so I'd appreciate any feedback on whether I can easily do the following (without too much custom coding on my own). These things are..

#1. I would like to display a "Last x messages" excerpts/teaser on the front page of my website. It seems people are more likely to get involved in forums if they can see some of the ongoing conversations easily. Is this possible with vBulletin? Maybe the topics of the last 3 messages integrated into a plain old PHP page (not inside the BBS itself)?

#2. I would like to create a seperate mySQL table and reuse the user account information for it. Basically, tracking some additional fields for the user (without having to add those fields directly to the MySQL database that vBulletin uses). So, I'm looking for this kinda of psuedo-code support...

If ($loggedIn) {
$userID = vBulletin.UserID;
"Select * from OtherTable WHERE userID = $userID";
} else {
echo "You are not logged in...please login here";
}

I don't need the mechanics on how to do this just yet, just a general "Yes, it is available and others have useful code for you to steal...er...reuse).

Thanks for any help,
Roy

[Steve Machol]

1. This can be done either by custom coding your home page or using oone of the available 'portal' add-ons for vB. Check the Portals forum at: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/

2. This also can be done with custom coding.

Please note that we don't provide official support for code modifications, but once you are a customer you can try asking for help with this over at vbulletin.org.

[Boot Liquor]

Spiffy, thanks. I figure most of what I want to do someone else has already gone through the pain of figuring it out.

[Reeve of Shinra]

depending on how you want to use those additional fields, it may make more sense to use the custom profile field option alreayd built into vb. You can choose whether users can edit it, view it, etc, and it can be called from alot of places in the forum script by just adding a varaible to the template you want to see it in.