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

Distributing a Style


You've made a great style, and you think that others might like to use it. You can choose to make it available for free, or you could decide to sell it. (Remember though that selling a style usually means having to provide the buyer with installation support.)

But how do you package it?

A style consists of the following elements:

  • An XML file containing the changes

  • All the custom images that go with it

To create a distribution package for a style, first take the custom XML file that you created and place it in a folder. (Call the folder the same name as the style.)

Then, download all the folders that contain custom images for the style from the web server. Make sure that you get the folders and the images. So, for our earlier example, we'd need to download the following folders:

  • images/custom/buttons

  • images/custom/statusicon

  • images/custom/attach

  • images/custom/misc

  • images/custom/editor

  • images/custom/polls

  • images/custom/rating

  • images/custom/reputation

Place these folders...