Uncharacteristically newbish question from me...

[mr e]

well this is just saying display the content in the template "footer", there's another one in vb (an eval) that is like gettemplate or something like that

eval("dooutput(\"".gettemplate('footer')."\");");

and this says, make the variable work in the current template

eval("\$statstable .= \"".gettemplate('battle_statsbottom')."\";");