hack planning- the first stages

[Dominick]

first question is this. am I allowed to use a second instance of vBulletin on my webserver if I have an htaccess pw protected folder for it to reside in. The forum will only be accessed by staff and any developers that I ask to help. It will not be available to the general public.

now for the hack

I had a thought, went something like this. if I could create a "task bar" something like the windows task bar or kde nav bar. Have it sit on the top of the page. This could direct traffic through out the site.

I was planning on creating a nav bar. left side would be a drop down with sub menus for navigation to other portions of the site. to the right side would be links to each forum and sub forum. Sound good so far?

Ive just begun planning and am scoping out ideas.

one thought that sounded simple was to include the nav bar into the header template.

another would be to rename index.php and create a new index. nav bar on top and conditionals calling includes for the php scripts that hold data for each page.

i think the header thoguht might work better though I am curiously exploring all ideas.

-Dom