Book Image

vBulletin: A Users Guide

Book Image

vBulletin: A Users Guide

Overview of this book

Written specifically to allow you to create a discussion forum, vBulletin, provides all of the tools, features and functionality for you to set up and develop a vibrant community. Because it specializes in this one aspect of your website, all the features are geared towards this goal, and you can leave the improvement and additions to the vBulletin developers while you get on with managing the rest of your website. If you are either already running a community forum based on vBulletin, or are planning on establishing one, then this is the book for you. This book will guide you through installing, configuring, managing and maintaining a vBulletin discussion forum on your own website. The book begins with the initial installation and configuration of vBulletin on your system. You will then go on a tour of vBulletin and its features, for both users and administrators. This will grow your understanding and familiarise you with the power and possibilities of vBulletin. vBulletin's Administration Control Panel is where you can control every aspect of your board. From users, forums and word filters to skins, templates and maintenance, everything can be done through the web-based control panel. The book devotes significant sections to covering these, getting you up to speed on the options available to you, and offering advice to help you make the right choices with your board administration. To make your forums stand out from the rest, we cover skins and templates to take your first steps in customising your forum. vBulletin is one of the most popular forum platforms available. Well known for its power and speed, it drives many of the most popular discussion forums on the Internet.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Building Forums with vBulletin
Credits
About the Authors
Preface

Branding


One thing that's important to the growth and success of a forum is branding. For a community to grow it needs to have a place that it feels is special and unique to it. vBulletin is a great discussion board tool because it is highly customizable, but forum owners can feel a little out of their depth at the beginning. Because vBulletin is so customizable, it can seem like there's an awful lot to do!

However, this doesn't have to be the case. You can start small and build from there. A good place to begin to establish your own brand and feel is to have your own logo on your forum!

Changing the Logo

As we saw earlier in this chapter, the default logo for a vBulletin discussion board is the vBulletin logo. Changing this logo is easy, but you have to know where to find it! First of all, make sure that you've uploaded your logo to the web server and that you know the location for it. You will need this later! To change the default logo follow these steps.

First, create or modify a logo...