Xthreads variable questions

[automaton]

I was playing around with the Xthreads tutorial for setting up a product review forum and what I would like to be able to do is to pass a custom thread field variable, i.e {$GLOBALS['threadfields']['pfname']} on to some PHP code to be able to use it as a PHP variable, to be able to do some stuff with it, i.e. stripslashes and so on.

It appears that there's a Xthreads plugin that enables PHP in templates.  Is this the way to go?  How would I use a custom thread variable reply as a PHP variable?  Am I being silly?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

thanks