[Replicant]

My most recent mod to my site is a split postbit. I saw it on ozzmods.com and just had to have it. I have it fully functional but I'm not fully satisfied with how I had to implement it. At first I had created a new template with all my code and called that template with {vb:template my_template} in the thread_header template. I had var dumps in the code and the variables werent being passed along to the new template. It wasn't working. I pasted all the code into the thread_header template and it worked perfectly. So, long story short,

Are the template variables local to each template?
Do I have to call the same {vb:data whatever ..... } code in each template?