Using custom templates in vBulletin 3

[Toneboy]

I've looked everywhere, posted on www.vbulletintemplates.com, found numerous solutions which appear to be relevant for vBulletin 2, and was up until 3.30am last night looking through code to get the answer without success. So I thought it might be best to come back here and hopefully then the answers can be easily found by lots of vB users (and not just me!).

After yesterday's post about site navigation I looked around a bit, and decided that putting the site navigation in a template might be the best answer. (I will be testing phpinclude_start template as well at some point, to see which gives me more flexibility.)

So I created a new template (called "site_navbar") and put what I wanted to it in, then tried to call it within the header template. Of course it isn't that simple.

So basically, $navbar brought up the navbar template, whereas $site_navbar did not bring up the site_navbar template.

I've looked around at various things. Various eval lines in files like global.php, I think I saw a "use templates" line in various files (which, unfortunately, appeared to be for vB 2).

So what exactly do you need to do so that your custom templates can be called in the same manner as the standard templates?

Thanks in advance - I hope other vB newbies find the answer to be as helpful as I will.