Auto-creating New Threads from Pages External to vBulletin

[jzader]

I just tried searching the forums for related keywords, but I didn't spot anything relevant....

I am in the process of integrating our new vBulletin installation, which is installed in a sub-folder of our main site, with an existing database of thousands of Q&A pairs on various topics related to small business ownership at askjim.biz.

When visitors of our web site read one of our answers on a given topic (these answers already exist in our sizeable database), we need them to be able to click on a link and discuss that topic in the forums. If a thread for that answer already exists in the forum, the link should take them to that thread. If it does not yet exist, we need the forum software to (probably prompt the visitor to) create a new thread.

Presumably, I'll need to pass through the answer ID for that Q&A pair from our existing database (and probably the name of the topic as well) to the vBulletin software.

The vBulletin support staff has pointed me to their Data Managers documentation and to this forum as leads for how to get started with this task. I've studied the Data Managers documentation, but it's still not really clear to me how to start tackling this task.

Clearly, the Data Managers feature is powerful, but I likely only need a tiny subset of what it can do, and I'm not sure where to begin with actually integrating it into our site and the vBulletin software to achieve the desired result.

And just to provide a little personal background, I'm a fairly experienced PHP programmer, but the kind of guy who learned it by doing it on sites rather than by taking courses in object-oriented programming or whatever. So I'm a little slow with the jargon sometimes. ;-)

Hopefully someone out there has experience with this kind of integration work, and can either give me some suggestions or point me toward another thread or tutorial on how to tackle this issue?

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!

Joshua