Newbie with a question

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post my query, but perhaps someone can direct me elsewhere if need be. I recently purchased vBulletin and am trying to move up the learning curve as quickly as possible. I'm interested in integrating vBulletin with a separate feature on our website called "Spin of the Day" (SOTD) which is basically a weblog featuring brief (one-paragraph) summaries with links to current news stories related to our organization's mission (examining public relations spin in the media). Like vBulletin, Spin of the Day is database-driven, with each SOTD item entered as a separate record in a mySQL database.

I would like to arrange things so that each SOTD item gets automatically entered simultaneously as a new thread in a vBulletin forum, with a link next to each item on the SOTD page enabling people to visit that thread simply by clicking on the link. The idea is to leave SOTD itself uncluttered by forum postings, while using SOTD postings to "seed" forum discussions.

Being new to PHP and vBulletin, I would appreciate it if someone could explain to me how I might write a script (in either Perl or PHP) that would accomplish this.

Sheldon Rampton
Webmaster, PR Watch
www.prwatch.org