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

Types of Customization


By now you're probably well aware of the fact that vBulletin is very versatile, and in keeping with this, you won't be surprised to learn that there are several different ways you can customize a vBulletin installation. In fact, there are five different types of change you can make.

These are:

  • CSS stylesheets—CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and it is a technology that enables web developers to decide how their web pages are displayed. This style information is stored in a stylesheet, which controls the way that things look on the final page outputted to the browser (and other devices such as printers).

  • Phrases—Nearly all the default text strings that are displayed by vBulletin are stored in the database as distinct phrases.

  • Templates—Templates control the layout and structure of almost every different page that vBulletin can show the end user.

  • PHP code—You can edit and add to the underlying PHP code of the vBulletin installation.

  • Hacks—Finally, you can modify...