Constant help needed. Learning how vBulletin works.

[Red Blaze]

I looked at some tutorials, but I still don't understand it clearly. It looks like a regular query, but... I feel uncertain, still.

Example: I plan to create a chat hack for my forums (I plan to share), but I don't know how vBulletin works. I know very small details, but not enough. I still need to understand how to run queries to gather information from a user.

When a user enters the page, php checks if the user is banned from the chat. In user, there's a table called chat_banned. With a value that would rather be a 1 or 0. (1 = True, 0 = False). And it also checks a group. In the same user table, there's a table called chat_group. Values would be one of the following: Admin, Mod, Member.

I need to tell php to get that info from MySQL. I know how to do it in a regular website, but this is vBulletin I'm getting into, and I'm not sure how the coding works.

I would really appreciate the help, and will be given credit in my planned hack.

I found some ways around, but now I'm in another confusing spot. This is my code:

PHP Code:

$status = $vbulletin->db->query_read("
        SELECT *
        FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "chat_info
        WHERE chat_id = 1
"); 

if($status['status'] != 'Active'){
eval('print_output("' . fetch_template('cs_closed') . '");');
exit;
} 


..And it's always saying it's closed. The status value is Active, in the database. But it's not reading that. What ever it's reading, or not reading, it doesn't say Active, and I think that's why it's always giving me that. What am I missing? Thank you for your advice!