CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi,
I usually create my PHP from scratch and I'm not used to big PHP application ... well I'm a PHP beginner .

My probleme now that I'm trying to use CMSMS is that I'm lost into the new vocabulary and new way of doing stuff that used to work in  the messy way.

For exemple :

• I used to make tables with AUTO_INCREMENT id en then just INSERT .. now I must use $newid = $db->GenID (cms_db_prefix ()."TM_seasons_seq"); before inserting a new row in my tables.
• I used to use mysql_fetch_rows($dbresult) but now in CMSMS I must use $dbresult->RowCount() (tooks me half a day to figure it)

Well now I need something like $_SESSION to keep track of a selected parameter, but I'm afraid of breaking something else if I do that .. Is there any CMSMS function that would do the same cleanly and easily ?

And then what about include() ? can I use it through the action.nameoftheaction.php pages of my new module ?

Thanks a lot in advance for your help.