[aileron79]

Hi everybody,
sorry in advance for me maybe talking rubbish, but I am completely new to developing plugin code for vbulletin. I am quite experienced in coding PHP, though. Boofo pointed me in the right direction (thanks for that), but, however, I am still facing the following problem:

I want to extend the list of online users (online.php) by another column. Information within that column is not extracted from the database but fetched from a third party. This has to be done for each user that shows up in the list of online users - but I have no idea which hook I may use.

At the moment, my plugin works pretty fine - but it is a bad mixture of source code hacking and template modifications. If any future upgrade replaces online.php, all my changes are gone. I added a very few lines of code in online.php (v4.1.0 PL2) starting from line 414, which basically adds another value to the $userinfo array which (as if this variable is registered) can be accessed from the whoisonlinebit template, where the output is generated from the additional value.

As mentioned before - so far, everything works fine but I truly hate source code modifications as they are gone after an update. Therefore, it would be great to know if there is another way of executing code (maybe in an external file) for each line in the result set. If I interpret the PHP source in online.php correctly, anything that should be executed for each user name should go inside the while loop on line 393. The instructions above explain how to use external files with hooks but I just can't figure out which hook to use in that case...

Is there a way to execute PHP code from templates without having a hook?

As I said, I am completely new to this stuff, please help...