[rob30UK]

hah well, I'm using it for more than just this, I just broke it right down above to try and get any form of datastore working.

No, what I am really doing is using the extra thread fields lite hack to add an extra field to threads in the glossary forum. The extra field takes a comma seperated list of keywords.

The keywords, or key phrases will then get automatically linked back to the thread whenever they occur in any post on the site. i use the extra thread field approach because our staff can easy add the linked terms when creating glossary threads.

My cron basically goes along once a day and caches the 'keywords' and 'threadid' for all threads (where that extra field isnt blank)

Everything up to this point works but I cant carry on because even though the data is in the database in the datastore table I cannot retrieve it no matter what I do. The alternative is to do a database SELECT from threads table where keywords (field1) != ''

I can of course code around not having a datastore, but the fact is we do have a datastore.... but it seems very difficult to use for 'custom' data. I still cant get it going.

this:- $vbulletin->mydatastoreitem
is it returned in the same variable type 'as entered' for instance if I pass a string to the datastore, will it return a string? Or does it always return an array, or something else?

Sorry if I am seeming a little thick, PHP isnt my usual sweetstuff.