help writing simple plugin

[kh99]

What you'd want to do is register the variable to your template. If the template is being rendered somewhere else, then you want to use "preRegister", like this:

vB_Template::preRegister('templatename', array('var' => $var));

then in the template you'd put {vb:raw var} wher eyou want it to appear.

There's another issue with what you posted because you might have more than one value returned from your query.

As for which hook location to use, that depends on which template you want to display the data in and where it's rendered.