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

Hacks


So far we've talked about making modifications to a vBulletin installation, and we've looked at four different ways to modify the installation. So far we've called the changes 'modifications', but the term that you are more likely to see used on the web is 'hacks'. Whenever a board is modified, it is said to be hacked (not to be confused with 'hacked' as in the security being compromised by a hacker), and modifications are known as hacks as in "hacks to a board". Basically, any change that alters the underlying code of the forum is looked upon as a hack. Changing the CSS and style settings through the interface is not generally thought of as a hack because these are expected and they don't change the underlying functionality of the board. However, making changes to the templates and the PHP code is definitely considered to be hacking the board. Making changes to the phrases that control the board is considered by many to be hacking too, though some just look at this as part of the...