Is this for vBulletin 3 or 4?

I mostly work with vB3, and the quickest way to include all of the vBulletin resources is to create a new php file in your forums directory with the following code.

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~8192);
require_once('./global.php');
var_dump($vbulletin);

That $vbulletin variable is the registry object that contains just about everything you’re ever going to need, including the database connection and it’s read and write functions, userinfo data, cleaned _POST and _REQUEST values, and a lot more (phrases, session data, caches, etc).

There are 4 database functions you’ll use the most.

• $vbulletin->db->query_read() // fetch more than one row
• $vbulletin->db->fetch_array() // converts the query_read returned data into an array
• $vbulletin->db->query_first() // fetches a single row
• $vbulletin->db->query_write() // update, insert or delete rows, tables, etc.

query_read is what you would use when you expect more than one result that you intend to loop through. For example, if you wanted to count all the words in a single thread, you would would need to query the post table with the threadid, loop through each post in that thread and count all the words in the message.

Note: “TABLE_PREFIX” is a constant set in config.php. It’s important to always prepend the table name with that constant in case other forums decide to prefix their tables.

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~8192);
require_once('./global.php');

$threadid = 1;

// fetch all post from a specfic thread
$posts = $vbulletin->db->query_read("
    SELECT pagetext 
      FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "post 
     WHERE threadid = $threadid
");

/**
 * Loop through each post.
 *
 * Here we use the "fetch_array" method to convert the MySQL data into 
 * a useable array. 99% of the time you'll use "fetch_array" when you 
 * use "query_read".
 *
 * $post will contains the post data for each loop. In our case, we only
 * have "pagetext" avaliable to use since that's all we told MySQL we needed
 * in our query. You can do SELECT * if you want ALL the table data.
 */
while ($post = $vbulletin->db->fetch_array($posts)) {
    $totalWords = $totalWords + str_word_count($post['pagetext']);
}

/**
 * Print the total number of words this thread contains.
 *
 * The "vb_number_format" is basically wrapper of php's "number_format", but
 * with some vBulletin extras. You can visit the /includes/functions.php file
 * for all the functions available to you. Many of them are just convenient 
 * functions so you don't have to repeat a lot of code. Like vBDate(), or 
 * is_valid_email().
 */
echo sprintf("Thread ID %i contains %s words", $threadid, vb_number_format($totalWords));

The query_first function is what you would use when you need to fetch a single row from the database. No looping required or anything like that. If, for instances, you wanted to fetch a single user’s information from the database – which you don’t need a query for, but we’ll do it as an example – you would use something like this.

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~8192);
require_once('./global.php');

$userid = 1;
$user = $vbulletin->db->query_first("
    SELECT *
      FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "user
     WHERE userid = $userid
");

echo sprintf("Hello, %s. Your email address is %s and you have %s posts",
    $user['username'], 
    $user['email'], 
    vb_number_format($user['posts'])
);

Lastly, if you wanted to update something in the database, you would use “query_write“. This function is pretty straight forward. This function just takes any MySQL update insert or delete query. For example, if I needed to update a user’s yahoo id, you would do.

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~8192);
require_once('./global.php');

$userid = 1;
$update = $vbulletin->db->query_write("
    UPDATE " . TABLE_PREFIX . "user
       SET yahoo = 'myYahooID@yahoo.com'
     WHERE userid = $userid
");

if ($update) {
    $userinfo = fetch_userinfo($userid);
    echo sprintf("Updated %s yahoo ID to %s", $userinfo['username'], $userinfo['yahoo']);
}

Hopefully this will help you get started. I would recommend using vBulletin 3 for a little while until you’re comfortable with it. I think it’ll be easier on you. Most of this will translate to vBulletin 4 with some tweaking, but that code base is not as friendly to new comers.