Customized Admin Control Panel

[Zedd]

I'm trying to build an admin page for a book appendix that will give me a front-end to modify appendix content (MySQL-based). I would like to use the vB admin control panel to do this, so that I can base permissions on existing user logins, rather than write an entire app just for the appendix.

I have added the ./global.php and permissions check from the admin pages to my own, but I have one of two problems, depending on how I code (PHP) the rest of the page:
1) The PHP does not parse at all
2) The admin login runs every time I try to pass a value to MySQL

Here's the admincp code I used:

// ######################## SET PHP ENVIRONMENT ###########################
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE);

// ##################### DEFINE IMPORTANT CONSTANTS #######################
define('CVS_REVISION', '$RCSfile: forum.php,v $ - $Revision: 1.83 $');
define('NO_REGISTER_GLOBALS', 1);

// #################### PRE-CACHE TEMPLATES AND DATA ######################
$phrasegroups = array('forum', 'cpuser');
$specialtemplates = array();

// ########################## REQUIRE BACK-END ############################
require_once('./global.php');

// ######################## CHECK ADMIN PERMISSIONS #######################
if (!can_administer('canadminforums'))
{
	print_cp_no_permission();
}

And here's a sample of PHP script from my page:

if (isset($HTTP_POST_VARS['Search'])) {
$colname_Search = (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) ? $HTTP_POST_VARS['Search'] : addslashes($HTTP_POST_VARS['Search']);
$query_Search = sprintf("SELECT * FROM tablename WHERE Field_1 LIKE '%%%s%%' OR Field_2 LIKE '%%%s%%' ORDER BY Field_0 ASC", $colname_Search, $colname_Search);
$Search = mysql_query($query_Search) or die(mysql_error());
$totalRows_Search = mysql_num_rows($Search);

echo "Your search for \"<i>$colname_Search</i>\" yielded <b>$totalRows_Search</b> results as follows:<br>
<table width=\"100%\" border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"2\">
	<tr style=\"font-weight: bold\">
	<td width=\"25%\" nowrap valign=\"top\">Topic</td>
	<td>Description</td>
	<td>From</td>
	</tr>
	<tr><td colspan=\"3\" height=\"3\" style=\"background: #AA0000\"></tr>
	<tr>";
while ($row_Search = mysql_fetch_assoc($Search)) {
echo "  <tr>
    <td width=\"25%\" nowrap valign=\"top\">".$row_Search['Field_1']."</td>
    <td>".$row_Search['Field_2']."</td>
	<td color=\"#AAAAAA\" nowrap valign=\"top\"><i>".$row_Search['Field_3']."</i></td>
  </tr>
  <tr><td colspan=\"3\" style=\"background: #666666\"></td></tr>
  <tr>";
  }
echo "</table>";
mysql_free_result($Search);
}

Am I doing this the hard way? How would I go about wrapping my page into the vB admin control panel? Can I use the vB admin security, and still build my own MySQL queries?

You can see the working appendix here, but it's not wrapped into vB like the admin page would be. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Zedd]

Was it something I said?