Contents of a post on an HTML page?

[TAOS]

Hi guys,

First post here, i apologise for it being a request for help. Here is some background information:

Me and some friends have been working on a website/forum for about a month now, and unfortunately the person who was supposed to be coding a website for us has dropped out. Leaving us with noone experienced in PHP to create the site.

So, i decided to learn PHP. Ive been learning for the last week (therefore im still very new) but im pleased with what i have done so far.

So far, ive made a small area on the homepage called "Latest News", which reads the titles of the 5 newest threads in the Announcements section of the forum (by reading from the vbulletin database)

Next to this, there is a link which says "read". When this is clicked, it sends the Post ID through the URL, which is read on the next page. On the next page i look up the post in the database, and display it - as well as who posted it, date, comments, etc.

In essence, it shows the thread titles in one panel, and when clicked, displays the post in another panel. The problem is, the text of the post is showing up as one big block of text when in the thread itself, there is spacing, bold text, italics, etc.

My 2 questions are:
1. am i going about this whole situation correctly, by reading straight from the database?
2. how on earth can i keep the formatting from the thread on my main page?

Thanks in advance, and remember, im very new at PHP, so try to keep answers quite newb-friendly