Need to clearify how to preRegister to template
 

Hi all,

I've spent the entire yesterday and today morning reading on how to use custom PHP code through plugins and referring to plugin-variables in a template, and I still haven't got it working. The approach to do this still seems a bit blurry even after reading multiple articles covering the subject, so please bear with me on these basic questions.

From my understanding you can't register a variable in existing templates, such as FORUMHOME. This is where I would like my code to be inserted. Do do that I need to preRegister the variable from my plugin code.

What I did was to make a new plugin. I made a name for it and set hook_location to global_start (If anyone has any links on when to use what hook please share). I leave execution order to 5 and the actual code for my new plugin looks like this:

If I got things right, I can access the variable only from the FORUMHOME template, because that's to where I registered it. And to access the variable I type this:

And there's the problem for me. Nothing shows up when I refresh my forum. I expect the contents of the variable "This is your custom code output!" to be shown but it's all just blank. What am I doing wrong and what is the proper way to do it?

Any help appreciated! Thank you.

global_start is deprecated since 4.0.2. use global_bootstrap_init_start instead

Thank you! Had no idea.