[matthew tucker]

Well I think I did it with the following hacked function. I used a sculptor's technique ... removed bits of code until it worked.

PHP Code:

// ###################### Start gettemplate #######################
function getmytemplate($templatename,$escape=1,$gethtmlcomments=1) {
  // gets a template from the db or from the local cache
  global $DB_site,$templatesetid,$addtemplatename;

    $gettemp=$DB_site->query_first("SELECT template FROM template WHERE title='".addslashes($templatename)."' ");
    $template=$gettemp[template];
 
  if ($escape==1) {
    $template=addslashes($template);
    $template=str_replace("\\'","'",$template);
  }

  if ($gethtmlcomments) {
    return "<!-- BEGIN MYTEMPLATE: $templatename -->\n$template\n<!-- END TEMPLATE: $templatename -->";
  }

  return $template;
} 


I'm not too clear how the template cache works, or what the $templatesetid and $addtemplatename variables are for - and maybe this will bugger up some other code - but so far so good, I'm happy. Thanks for your responses.