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

Global Post Text Find and Replace


This is something that many board administrators want to do but aren't sure how—messing with the database directly seems dangerous to many. It is quite simple though, and you can do it all through the AdminCP.

Log into the AdminCP, and in the left-hand menu click on Import & Maintenance followed by Execute SQL Query. If you are greeted with a message that says: You are not authorized to execute SQL queries you will need to add your user ID number to the line: $canrunqueries = ''; in the includes/config.php file. For example, if your user ID is 1, this line will become: $canrunqueries = '1';

Now you can run queries. To carry out a find and replace on all the post data in your board, you will need to run an SQL query like this: UPDATE post SET pagetext = REPLACE (pagetext,'Vbulletin','vBulletin') WHERE pagetext LIKE '% Vbulletin%';

This SQL query looks through the posts for instances of Vbulletin and replaces them with vBulletin. The WHERE clause is used...