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

Template Lifecycles


A discussion board can go through one of two distinct template lifecycles. Which one it follows depends a lot on the administrator of the forum and what they are trying to achieve with it.

Lifecycle 1—Constant Change

This lifecycle is probably the more common of the two and probably accounts for many of the customized vBulletin boards you've come across.

This is where the administrator installs their copy of vBulletin and gets their forum going as quickly as possible. So, in order to minimize any delay between getting the discussion board installed and getting it working, they simply open up the forums for discussion using of the default style (or download and use another style that they fancy).

Then, with the board open and operational, the administrator sets about making incremental changes to the discussion board. They start off small, perhaps adding their logo, or changing a font color or table background. Then they start to make bigger, more significant changes. Then...