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 7. Changing the Look of vBulletin

In this chapter we're going to examine ways to change how your vBulletin installation looks to the outside world.

The sky's pretty much the limit with what you can do with vBulletin, and there's no point going through the process of building a custom style here, because what you will want to do will be different to what we will do. So, instead, we'll offer you some hints, tips, and insights into style manipulation and creation for vBulletin.

In this chapter we will look at:

  • The role of styles and templates in vBulletin

  • How to modify the default style

  • How to add and edit a new style

  • How to distribute a style that you have created

  • How to upload a new style to your server and install it

Styling vBulletin

There are two ways that styles get created for vBulletin:

  • Modification of the default style

  • Creation of Custom styles

By far the most common method of creating styles for vBulletin is to start off with the default style (the blue and white style that you've seen...