[kh99]

You should be able to include global.php inside an if statement, but the current directory needs to be the directory where global.php is (your forum directory). So if the script that includes global.php is not there, you need to do something like:

chdir('path/to/forum');
include_once("global.php");
// chdir() back if necessary

and you don't need to declare $vbulletin as global if you're not inside a function.

Including it inside a function is possible, but to do it there are certain variables that need to be declared as global *before* the include, and I don't know offhand what they all are - obviously $vbulletin is one, I think $bootstrap might be another. Maybe you could write a test script and call get_defined_vars() before and after including global.php, then diff the arrays and see what vars were created (although some of them may not be needed after global.php is done).