[Jon_Simmonds]

Right, what I want to achieve is for a small selection of forums within my forum to be represented differently in the forum home template, before the main forum listing. To get around the forums being listed in the main $forumbits, I would make them to "invisible" so they wouldnt be included in $forumbits but still visible if the url is known.

So what I would have had in forum home would have been:

<!-- main -->
MY CUSTOM CODE FOR MY SELECTED FORUMS HERE
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center">
<thead>
	<tr align="center">
	  <td class="thead">&nbsp;</td>
	  <td class="thead" width="100%" align="$stylevar[left]">$vbphrase[forum]</td>
	  <td class="thead" width="175">$vbphrase[last_post]</td>
	  <td class="thead">$vbphrase[threads]</td>
	  <td class="thead">$vbphrase[posts]</td>
	  <if condition="$vboptions['showmoderatorcolumn']">
	  <td class="thead">$vbphrase[moderator]</td>
	  </if>
	</tr>
</thead>
$forumbits
<tbody>
	<tr>
		<td class="tfoot" align="center" colspan="<if condition="$vboptions['showmoderatorcolumn']">6<else />5</if>">

Now when I looked at the template forumhome_forumbit_level1_post I find the values for the number of threads and posts are $forum[threadcount] and $forum[postcont] - how can I return the value of these for a specific forum?

And somethign more advanced, but not something I need at the moment, but can some forum of conditionals be used to achieve the following?

while forumdisplayorder <=10
$forumbits - just for forum id's 1 to 10
my special code for forum with display order of 11
while forumdisplayorder >=12
$forumbits - just for forums id's above 12

Hope that all made sense, sorry for the waffling but thought it was needed to show what I was trying to achieve

off to get a drink as my brains starting to hurt!

Jon