[Forum] PHP Crippled?

[MixAddicts]

Okay, I've read the documentation and I've wandered through the forums but nobody seems to have asked or answered the question ... why has PHP been crippled so severely? Is vB afraid of security holes?

I was running WordPress with vBulletin as my forums, but the CMS option looked quite appealing for integrating the blog and user accounts all into one solution, but since I've upgraded and have been tinkering around with things, I've had nothing but frustration in trying to get PHP running properly.

What I want is a simple way of calling up my existing PHP files without having to jump through these stupid "make a new template, make a new layout, make a widget, modify the template so it doesn't show the content" hoops. It's my site, let me risk breaking it or having security holes.

The closest I've found is the include method but even that requires the $output bull.

Bottom line - what's the easiest solution with the least amount of steps for me to run my existing PHP scripts?

[MixAddicts]

C'mon guys ... 91 views and nobody has anything to add?

[Edwin Brown]

I think when you say "PHP has been crippled so severely" you mean "vBulletin hasn't yet released a php executable content type". The answer is because we've been busy fixing bugs, and because we haven't heard that many people asking for it.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'the $output bull'. If you want to use echo, there are at least a dozen posts, here and on vBulletin.org, that tell you how to do it by buffering the output and capturing the buffer. It's not difficult. Because the page is rendered out of order, setting the value of a variable is really the only way to generate the page properly. I currently have a couple people testing a php content type that will let you include php as the primary page content. I had hoped to have it posted in a blog by now, but I've spent most of the last two days on security testing and fixes.