How to pull manufacturers

[logicPwn]

I am a knowledgeable web coder already. I was recently called upon to create a web store and chose OpenCart for obvious reasons. OpenCart is real nice and simple enough but it doesn't have that many free modules, makes me sad. I am learning to create them myself and pretty much just doubled the admin end of the account module and branded it manufacturers (creating a module to display a list of manufacturers or maybe a drop down list, still throwing around ideas a bit). I have done the language, controller, and view and now onto the catalog side. I have doubled the latest controller and working from there, cleaning it out and adapting it to my needs.

What I need to know is how to grab the manufacturers using the OpenCart preferred method. I have noticed that OpenCart has an API but it's not exactly well documented. Is there a function to pull this data or do I need to execute a query?

I plan on releasing this module for free regardless if there is already one. I don't really care if it's been done at this point as I am learning to do basic extensions for OpenCart and it will help down the road if not in the near future.

[logicPwn]

Scratch that, I'm an idiot. Of course OpenCart already had functionality to show manufacturers so I just copied that.

Side note: first time with MVC and kind of liking it. At first seemed like a headache but in a big PHP app like OC it works nice.