custom variables?

[citizen]

I've been looking around to see if I could find a way to pull custom information from the database into one of the template php's and am not having much luck.

What I really want to do is put an icon or special color for forums that have specific permissions. But at this point, I would settle for being able to create a custom column in the database for each forum and seeing that data show up in the forum list.

does anyone know how to do this?
or better yet, is this well documented anywhere?

Thanks
-Citizen