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

Setting Up a Forum


As administrator you will create several forums within your discussion board so that members can find the right place for the topics they want to discuss. For example, you might divide a discussion group related to computers into two different forums called Hardware and Software.

However, these forums may become crowded so that you would find it useful to break down these topics into subtopics as follows:

  • Hardware—PCs, CPUs, Hard drives, Video adapters, Memory

  • Software—Windows, Linux

Of course, these topics could be subdivided even further.

By now, you probably get the picture on how this works. But there's a deeper level that you can take this to. First thing's first. A forum doesn't appear from nowhere. It takes planning and preparation.

Your discussion board will probably have moderators who will take care of moving posts and deleting unacceptable comments, as well as hosting discussions within the forums. You might also have other administrators. It would be good to...