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

Moving Servers in Six Easy Steps


If your discussion board grows beyond the capabilities offered by your current host, then you can migrate the whole vBulletin installation from one server to another with the minimum of fuss and effort. In this section we will look at how to do this.

We can break down the server move into six easy steps.

  • Cookie check

  • Back up database

  • Download the vBulletin installation

  • Transfer to new server

  • Restore database

  • Back online!

Cookie Check

The first thing to do is check on the current cookie settings. Setting a specific cookie domain and cookie paths can cause problems for you when moving servers or even changing the URL of the discussion board. To prevent these problems, reset your cookie path to / and remove any cookie domain value that might be present before carrying out the server move.

Note

A warning about cookies!

Note

An incorrectly set cookie domain or path can prevent you from accessing your control panel!

Back up Database

The next step is to back up the database....