I am so excited, as it is now working. I wasn't familiar with the clone command at all, and I think that was what hung me up earlier in my tests. I see that came out with PHP5, which I am using... but my experience with PHP programming per se was with 4 (been doing Python for past years so have had to adjust my thinking to do my customization work on Moodle
Using your suggetsion above, I was able to get my test script status.php (attached) to work 100%. I really appreciate the assistance. Now I can use that to set status to make that "welcome page/video" block appear once, when they first login to the site!
Thanks again,
Jamie