The Basics of Hacking

[John]

Has anyone ever had the time to write a txt file on the basics of vB board hacking? Like how it works, where things are read from, how the pages are put together, etc.

And if not - why not!

[Neo]

Yes I have. But it comes int he forum of a PHP book, documents from mysql.com, and having a good sence of know what other peoples code does.

[John]

/me sighs

Of course if you have a good knowledge of php and SQL you're pretty much already there - but I meant for those just starting out in both fields and need info aimed at hacking vB boards.

[Neo]

Nope. the way I learned was to just look around the templates and go through all the code.. there is no real way to teach someone how to hack vbulletin.. due to the fact that it would be just like teaching php which takes time... but here is your first lesson $bbuserinfo[] can get any row from the user table.. example $bbuserinfo[usertitle]

[John]

Lol, that was actually quite a handy bit of info! Is there anywhere that lists all of the info regarding the $variables?

Oh, and solve this!: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=43388

[DjSap]

btw neo whats the diffrence between $session[] and $bbuserinfo[]? cuz they do the same thing, so which is better to use?

[Neo]

bbuserinfo[]

[Admin]

The $session and $bbuserinfo arrays are not the same, $session holds the session info of the user taken from the session table, and $bbuserinfo holds the user info and options taken from user/userfield tables.

[John]

Any other gems you hacking masters wish to share?

[Neo]

always back up your files, the admin scrpits done use templates, and play around with code to see what it does just to learn.

[Sparkz]

And maybe the most important thing:
Always try it out on your dev board first.
*shudders at the though of all the posts like 'Help me. I can't even access admin cp' etc...*

Oh, and noone mentioned the obvious yet... BACK UP YOUR DATABASE.