[kh99]

If you're trying to put things in the header, headinclude, headinclude_bottom, footer, or one of the ad templates, then the preRegister has to be done before any other templates are used (because those templates get rendered in one of the initialization functions, and after that it's too late). In vbulletin with no mods, you could do it in your custom page before you rendered any templates. But some mods might use templates earlier (in a hook that's called when global.php is included), so it's best if you could do it in hook parse_templates. That way you'd avoid future problems where you might install a mod and have things break.

If your script can do whatever it has to do to set those variables without including global.php, then you could include global.php later in the file (but I guess that's unlikely since you need global.php to use the database or the logged in user's data).

Edit: another possibility - the those templates I mentioned are rendered and kept in some global variables. You might be able to insert a place holder (like and html comment), and then do a str_replace() on the appropriate variable once you have the value.