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

Chapter 6. Upgrading vBulletin

Nothing stays the same. Life is a constantly moving forward, and software moves forward faster than most things. vBulletin is constantly changing as new versions are released. Sometimes these are big changes (such as from version 2 to version 3), and other times they are just bug fixes and security updates (such as 3.5.2 to 3.5.4).

The updates to vBulletin generally contain security fixes rather than cosmetic tweaks, so it is important to install them in a timely fashion so as to eliminate security vulnerabilities in your discussion board.

Note

License issues

Note

Purchasing a license for vBulletin (either leased or owned) entitles you to a year's worth of updates. After this, you will need either to renew your license (if you leased the license) or to pay a nominal fee for updates (if you bought an owned license).

In this chapter, we're going to look at how to upgrade a vBulletin discussion board from version 3.5.2 to 3.5.5. In particular, we will look at:

  • How vBulletin...