I need a couple questions answered regarding the forumcache and gpc

[p0lar_bear]

Hello everyone. I've made a topic here before, but I feel I wasn't descriptive enough of what I was trying to do, and as a result, nobody replied. When I went to bump it with a fix, the forums merged my doublepost. So, I'm going to try this again.

I'm working on a modification that will filter out forums on the index based on a supplied variable. I'm trying to get it to work with .htaccess internal redirects and vBA, just so you know. I'm not exactly a total newb to PHP, but I'm no whiz at it either. vBulletin, on the other hand, is completely new ground to me, and the way things are coded make me confused.

What I've done so far is add a column to my forums table called "pageid," and then edited class_dm_forum.php to include this new column. After doing this, I am able to specify an identifier for a forum in the ACP's forum manager. I can save it, load it, edit it, and it changes in the database.

First, what I need to know is if I need to change anything else to get this column to appear in $vbulletin->forumcache. Is the forumcache a PHP replica of the forums table, or does it only get certain columns from that table?

Second, I'm new to using the GPC, which from what I gather is to be used instead of $_GET, $_POST, and $_REQUEST. Is this code correct for getting and then using a "pageid" variable specified in the URL:

$vbulletin->input->clean_gpc($_GET, 'pageid', TYPE_NOTRIM);
if ($vbulletin->GPC['pageid'] == $some_variable)
{
 //Do something.
}

Third, I'd like to know exactly where $vbulletin->forumcache is first populated. I've looked everywhere for it, and all I've found is a depreciated function that starts with a die();.


Any help at all is appreciated; I'm running on a deadline that's been extended and I've been stumped for a few weeks on this.