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

Phrase Modifications


There is very little built-in text in the forum. By "built-in text" we mean text that is hard-coded into pages and can only be changed by making changes to the source files. In fact, almost all the text that you see (apart from forum text and titles and such) is stored as phrases, and there is a great deal of logic behind separating the code of the forum from the text.

To begin with, it makes it easy to create language packs for the forum that customize the base language of the forum. There are in fact a number of language packs that have been created for vBulletin, including French, Spanish, Arabic, and Hebrew. Links to a number of these can be found on the official vBulletin site at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=99151.

Another major advantage is that, in order to make a change to the text in the forum, an administrator does not need to change critical files containing PHP code, where a single error could bring down the forum. It is far safer and easier...