[Jacob B]

does anyone know what code i would need to put exactly on the home page? and then again what code would i need to put in the global.php file?

Nothing should be inserted into your global.php file unless told to do so by a member of staff at www.vbulletin.com as part of a support issue.

i think i'm not understanding exactly where to put that code you gave me....and then on top of that....what i would need to do to 'set the PHP environment'

When you're creating a vBulletin-powered page, it requires a PHP file to get it up and running if you want to include user accounts, etc. There are many articles available to do this, including this one here. I firmly suggest reading over that particular article to get a feel for using vBulletin PHP.

Here is how a standard vBulletin-powered page should look (this one is called test.php, taken from the article posted above):

PHP Code:

<?php 

// ######################## SET PHP ENVIRONMENT ########################### 
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE); 

// ##################### DEFINE IMPORTANT CONSTANTS ####################### 
// change the line below to the actual filename without ".php" extention. 
// the reason for using actual filename without extention as a value of this constant is to ensure uniqueness of the value throughout every PHP file of any given vBulletin installation. 

define('THIS_SCRIPT', 'test');  

// #################### PRE-CACHE TEMPLATES AND DATA ###################### 
// get special phrase groups 
$phrasegroups = array(); 

// get special data templates from the datastore 
$specialtemplates = array(); 

// pre-cache templates used by all actions 
$globaltemplates = array( 
        // change the lines below to the list of actual templates used in the script 
        'test_mytesttemplate1', 
        'test_mytesttemplate22', 
); 

// pre-cache templates used by specific actions 
$actiontemplates = array(); 

// ########################## REQUIRE BACK-END ############################ 
require_once('./global.php'); 

// #################### HARD CODE JAVASCRIPT PATHS ######################## 
$headinclude = str_replace('clientscript', $vbulletin->options['bburl'] . '/clientscript', $headinclude); 

// ######################################################################## 
// ######################### START MAIN SCRIPT ############################ 
// ######################################################################## 

$navbits = array();  
// change the line below to contain whatever you want to show in the navbar (title of your custom page) 
$navbits[$parent] = 'Test Page'; 

$navbits = construct_navbits($navbits); 
eval('$navbar = "' . fetch_template('navbar') . '";'); 

// change the line below to contain the name of the actual main output template used in your script 
eval('print_output("' . fetch_template('test_mytesttemplate1') . '");'); 

?>

Do you see how he's inserted his global.php file? That's what you need to do. Then you can use variables such as: $username, $bbuserinfo[userid], etc.