Additional SSI Stuff

[IronTank]

Hey, I don't know if anyone has asked this yet and I've searched the boards for awhile and haven't quite found anything about it. I've found similar things though. (Maybe I've been searching wrong? Don't know.) In my opinion this was probably too easy so no one asked. 

But, I don't want to network multiple boards/forums together or something like that.
I have a domain with too much to share so I did give a few friends sub domains, but since neither of us are expert or advanced programmers/coders we don't want to update news on our websites by editing, lets say, news.php. We kind of wanted to have a memory like MySQL DB.. so I wanted to link forum news to the sites which is why SMF was useful.

So I gave each subdomain a board and whatever sub-board belonged to that board was theirs. The only reason I did this is because after they entered that board.. they won't see the forum as a whole making it "their" board. I've seen a website that uses SMF that allowed it to only show a specific category of the whole forum.
hxxp:www.monkey-pirate.com/forum/index.php?action=showcat;cat=10;theme=5 [nonactive]
And you don't see the forum as a whole unless you click on the link above "board name".
I've tried what they did. ?action=showcat;cat=10 and replaced the cat=10 with my category number, but it doesn't work for me. I don't know if it has anything to do with themes but I don't think so.. since I took away ";theme=5" and it showed only that category still.

Anyways back to showing forum info to the websites. This is why we loved SSI.php because of the ssi_function=boardNEWS;board=n functions, but we could not separate somethings.

So, we were wondering if we could.. Like say show the latest poll for a specific board. We like the topic=## for the polls but wanted to do more.
Or show the latest topics/replies..etc. for a specific category, board(including all it's sub boards), or even topics.

I browsed SSI.php and tried to understand it to the best of my abilities.. tried anyway, and noticed that boardnews has $board = null that the others didn't have.
So I was wondering if I added that to the others like for example:
original: function ssi_recentPoll($output_method = 'echo', $topPollInstead = false)
Added: function ssi_recentPoll($board = null, $output_method = 'echo', $topPollInstead = false)
Would that work?

I'm sorry if this is a real easy one and I'm asking for help causing some of you experts to cringe, but I'm really new at this eventhough I know little php. ^^''