Writing a myBB plugin [was "OK - I'm over my head here. Please rescue!"]

[rockingit 0]

Hi all.

 

I hope one of you lovely people can take pity on me and point me in the right directions.

 

I'm creating a new forum site using myBB and it's gone swimmingly well so far.  I'm happy with pretty much defaults plus a few tweaks (which is why I chose it as opposed to something cost based like IPB) it's all up and running and I could launch it for membership now.   But, there's a key feature that I want to implement which in my head sounds so easy and obvious but isn't there, or as a plugin and I'm not getting any response on the myBB community.

 

The member profiles are also acting as a bullet point style resume - so users can tick the boxes of skills that apply to them, etc.  From within the board I then want to have a search page (as different from the normal thread search) which grabs all those fields into a dropdown and then produces a list of matching users.   It's a very simple old-school query that on something like Access would take seconds.   My problem is that I've zero idea of how to go about it on this.  My php coding is nil and I'm still trying to work out which SQL tables on the server database have the relevant bits of data in them.

 

Please send lifeboat.