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

Hacking vBulletin


Let's take a look at how to create a vBulletin hack. The hack we're going to be developing here is one that allows you to control how vBulletin handles private message receipts. As we saw in Chapter 3, private messages, known as PMs, are messages that one member can send to another member of the board.

The member types a message into the private message window and then clicks on the Submit Message button.

The recipient can collect the message the next time they log in (or, if they are already logged in, the next time they request a new page from the board).

But there's one feature that seems to annoy some members (especially if it's a popular board where the members make a lot of use of the PM facility). This is the read receipt feature. When a PM is submitted, a message box is displayed asking the sender whether they want to request a read receipt.

Read receipts are a useful feature, but the problem is the message box displayed—people find it gets in the way and often they...