Teach a man to fish?

[mdevour]

Hi there,

This is my first forum project and I'm busily updating my stale HTML skills while starting to learn about CSS, PHP, MySQL, and vBulletin. Rather than ask a bunch of "How do I..." type questions, I'd like to learn enough about the way vBulletin works to work out a few of my own answers. That's the "Teach a man to fish" part.

My first step beyond simple Admin config things is to change the behavior of the template for Category strips on the forum index page depending on which one it is. I was told there is a variable for the forum id that I ought to be able to use as the argument to a template conditional.

I bet there are dozens of useful variables besides the forum ID, that I could use for stuff like this if I knew what they were.

Is there documentation for what variables there are?

Where in all these vBulletin files are variables like that declared? (Where's the source code??!)

How do I find out what values they can have, their scope, and so on?

Are there some development tools I need to learn?

Yep, pretty basic questions. I thank you if you can help me answer some of them!

Mike D.