[nerbert]

I had gotten as far as build_datastore() but couldn't find where was queried. Your idea almost did it but you have to do it like this:

$datastore_fetch[] = "'my_project'";

Notice the nested quotes. I haven't followed it all the way through but I suspect the single quotes are there so it can be used in an eval to create $vbulletin->my_project from the serialized data stored under 'my_project' in datastore.

336   ($hook = vBulletinHook::fetch_hook('init_startup')) ? eval($hook) : false; 
337	
338	 if (!empty($datastore_fetch))
339	 {
340	     // Remove the single quotes that $datastore_fetch required
341	     foreach ($datastore_fetch AS $value)
342	     {
343	         $new_datastore_fetch[] = substr($value, 1, -1); 
344	     }
345	 }

My first idea here was to build all my options in settings > options then manually delete (not with the [delete] link) the setting group so it wouldn't show in settings>options. It still worked but I looked at the product xml file and it won't export the options if the group name is deleted.

Another idea I was tinkering with was to gather all the settings into an array in the code block to which the form submits , then serialize the array and write it to a file my_project/settings.txt. My project has its own my_project/global.php that is required by the other files, and in there it would read the file and unserialized the data into a settings array for all the other files. Either approach would work but I think I'll go with using datastore just to be more like vBulletin coding.

Thanks for the help.