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

Migrating Changes


Before you upload the files to the server, stop and think for a moment. Have you carried out any changes to the core PHP files of vBulletin? (We saw how to customize a bulletin board in Chapter 4.) If you have made any changes, uploading the new files will obliterate these changes. Most people want to keep any changes they made to their vBulletin installation, and this often keeps them from carrying out upgrades.

If there is only one change, then it may be easier just to make the same change again after the upgrade. However, if there are many changes, repeating them will be much more complicated and will need a lot more time and effort, and of course, there will always be scope to get things wrong. What you want is a file compare utility that highlights the differences between two files.

In Chapter 4, we saw how to modify the PHP code so that PayPal treats a subscription as a goods transaction. We will use this example to show how a file compare utility can be used to easily...