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

Forum Management


You've seen that any member can create new threads or post replies to threads, but you might be wondering how new forums are created within the discussion area?

Be default, one forum exists. This is called Main Forum, and it has the imaginative description of Main Forum Description. This is within a category called Main Category, which again has an imaginative description: Main Forum Description.

These names are of course placeholders, and you are expected to change them (although you do see the occasional forum using these names!)

Editing and Adding Forums

Once the board is set up, you need to give people a place to go to so that the talking (or typing!) can happen. The placeholder forum is there just to show you where the forums appear on the page—the developers expect you to create your own!

To create discussion areas, you have two options open to you:

  • Edit existing forums

  • Add new forums

You can make these changes in the AdminCP. In the left-hand menu, click on Forums and Moderators...