I found these forums through a link to [How-To] Simple hack development stages, and as a beginner it certainly helped start to bring things together for me.

The problem is that I don't know that much PHP, and would prefer to dabble with the PHP and SQL code and get a vBulletin concept to work before I integrate it into the forums. Is there a simple and separate php file example available that would allow me to call on e.g. vBulletin's database routines. I could then play around and develop the code, and only then, import it into vBulletin.

That looks very useful. Thanks Nick.