Basic Questions

[Ron1n]

I am a pretty advanced PHP coder, but I would like to utilize some of the built in vBulletin functions to save me time and keep my hack uniform, portable, and completely vB compatable. I also dont want to spend a lot of time searching for answers in the vB source, as it is not especially well documented.

1) What function parses text like a post, and what are its parameters (i.e. parsing flags)
2) After adding a permission variable in the admincp and altering it, what is required to access that permission variable.
3) After adding a field to the user table, can that data be accessed in bbuserinfo['field_name'] or do I need to find and edit the function that gets the user information.
4) What calls the special GUI textbox you see for posting? I dont want to just call one function, because different users want different displays that they set in their usercp.

Thats all, it saves me a quite a bit of time if someone who already mods vB could help me out.