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

Importing Data into vBulletin


If you are moving to vBulletin from another type of discussion board, then there is a good chance that you won't want to lose all the posts that you already have and start again with nothing. And it's not just the posts that are important—what about all your member information—usernames, passwords, profile data? You don't want to lose all that and start with a blank forum!

To make migration easier, the vBulletin development team has created a Import/Export script (called the ImpEx script).

Downloading the ImpEx Script

The ImpEx script is available from the Member Area on the vBulletin site. This means that you need a valid license to be able to download it.

After downloading the script, you will need to extract the files into a convenient location (just as you did with the vBulletin installation files).

Compatibility

The following boards are supported in the ImpEx script:

  • IPB (version 2)

  • phpBB (version 2.0.4 - 2.0.11 MySQL and MSSQL))

  • Infopop eve (EVE: version 1.2...