complete noob with vb4.0. huh? what? how? gulp!?

[volcomjon]

Hi everyone.
so - as the title says - im a complete newbie to VB forums, ive set my very first forum up (using VB4) and now im like, what the..... how the.....

ive skimmed through the manual, and to be honest - its just way too much to take in all at once, and im sure most of the settings I will never touch, or need to, not for the moment at least.

And so I thought I would start a thread with a few of the questions to get me started.
As ive been browsing around and looking at numerous forums out there (primarily built using VB) I have seen a bunch of sexy features I would like to have in mind - but have NO idea where to start. hopefully you can help.

ive installed my first mod about 5 minutes ago, which was the "SevenSkins SideColumn" giving me a collapsable box to the right hand side.... now this is all well and good if I want to put in some "dumb" content like a banner. But how do I fill it with "rich" content - for example:

• a poll
• the latest posts
• recently registered members etc etc
• Site statistics

much like the vbulletin.org left hand side bar.

are there just some simple PHP calls to add into the side bar that will "suck" this information in? where do I find them?
im referrering to similar functionality to wordpress with their "widgets" - do widgets exist in VB4 where do I get them from, how do I insert into a page!?

Basically what im trying to say is that I have a pretty much out of the box forum at the moment, and everyone else seems to have some nice little feature here and there that looks cool.

a couple of other features I have spotted:

• fixed width / full width
• The top nav (tabs) - do I just go in and edit the html directly and add new buttons as I see fit?

So... anyone out there willing to point me (help me out) in the right direction?


cheers

--------------- Added [DATE]1260370192[/DATE] at [TIME]1260370192[/TIME] ---------------

bumpety bump....
surely someone must be able to give me a few pointers..... please!?