Newbie with dumb questions

[Radar]

I'm an administrator in a friend's Vbulletin forum but I'm totally ignorant about PHP and MySql and I'm not inclined or have the time to learn them.
I hope someone can answer these questions in a way I can understand.
I'm good with HTML, graphics and stuff like that but this got me confussed.
First, how to access the mysql DB for example with ftp or telnet, can it be done?
Second, when some files are deleted from the forums it looks as if they still remain in the DB, how can I delete them from there?
Third: When I look at the page-source for index.html in Netscape or explorer I see that it's composed of HTML tags and the path is something like user/forums/index.php$s= and if using ftp I look at index.php is not the same file, how can I download the index.php$s= so I can edit it?
Fourth: How can the apache-access.log and apache-error.log and other logs in the log directory can be deleted or edited to reduce their size? in 2 weeks they are now over 150MB total, I want to save the space and I couldn't do it with FTP or telnet.
OK, don't hit me too hard, I'm not a hacker and don't know anything about scripting, so if you should give me a php script or command, please tell me exactly how to use it, PLEASE!
THANKS!

[mr e]

#3 -- if you do View/Source, your seeing the HTML equivelent of that page, you would have to get the index.php file via FTP, so you would do ftp.YOURSITE.com, then it would ask you for a name and a pass, then u enter that and find the folder that there in and usually drag and drop to ur desktop or right click and do Save to Folder, but that's with IE 6

[Radar]

hehe, thanks mre, a lesson on ftp.
I've done that, even with telnet , maybe I didn't explain myself:
If I do the view-source thing I'm looking at the html format of index.php and the path is www.mysite.com/forums/index.php$s=

meaning that the file is in /forums/index.php, right? wrong, I look at the index.php in /forums/ (with ftp ) and is not the same file that I can see in view-source, is not a html file but a php file, they are totally different files even so the path point to the same file name.
My guess is that the index.php file that I find in /forums/index.php is a pointer to the index.php stored in mysql, I don't know.
thanks!

[mr e]

ok it's confusing to explain, but you ARE actually viewing the index.php file, but when it hits the browser it displays it in HTML so when you do View/Source your only seeing what HTML is being out put by the PHP file...did that make sense?

[Jalrock]

Or you can say:

the index.php file is pulling info from the database and outputing the html code so your browser can display it.

Nearly all of the HTML you see when viewing source is pulled from templates viewable / editable from the admin panel.

[mr e]

lol or ya you could explain it the easy way :P