Tabs plugin and content identity problem

[anolian]

Hi

With the help of this forum (thanks!) I have made a plugin that sets a global the id of a CMS content item's parent using:

$this->content->getParentId();

...then if that value matches a preset set of values, another plugin sets the $root variable to a specific tab identity thus ensuring a particular tab is selected.

This mostly works fine - except for this strange exception.

I have a section containing three subsections. Each of these is a child of the section (according to the Section Manager and the Section Widget, and as indicated by the values in cms_node.parentid).

But one of the subsections never displays the correct tab - instead the "articles" tab is enabled. The other two work fine.

I've cleared vbulletin and browser caches, changed browsers, restarted Apache, turned off vbSEO, repaired the cms node table, repaired and optimised tables and rebuilt indexes, but no difference. I've even deleted and recreated the subsection.



Any idea what I might have missed please?

Thanks very much for any suggestions, Mike

--------------- Added [DATE]1364147925[/DATE] at [TIME]1364147925[/TIME] ---------------

PS - failing any concrete suggestions, can anyone tell me how I can get a plugin to output something to the page or to a file so I can see what is happening while the plugin is executing please?

If I could do that I could at least debug my plugin!