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I am a rather large newbie to PHP in general, so excuse my ignorance.  I have a site that I want to use PunBB for the forums as well as a "portal" page.  I have the forum part set up for the most part.  One thing that is driving me insane though is my inability to find out how to create a custom CSS styled menu that will be on both the portal page and the forums page, have the "active" tab/page highlighted (via CSS), as well as take advantage of the users logged in status (i.e., they see the profile, logout tabs when logged in, etc.).  I did find this page on how to set the CSS for the active page, however I can't figure out how to add this type of stuff in the middle of the function that generates the navlinks.

http://www.sebastiansulinski.co.uk/web_ ? button.php

I see this on several other PunBB sites so it is obviously possible, but for the life of me I cannot find squat on how to do it.  Please keep in mind that I just started doing PHP about a week ago and am very frustrated at this point.  There is a lot of information floating around here, but it seems very difficult to find.  Any help is deeply appreciated.  Thanks in advance.
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archmage