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

Smilies


Because a forum relies on text-based communication, anything that helps someone get their message across is a good thing. That's where smilies come in. They are little graphics that have a variety of faces displaying different emotions.

Smilies are controlled through the control panel. If you click on Smilies in the left-hand menu, then three options will be made available.

Clicking on Smilie Manager will take you to a window where you can edit, move, delete, or view smilie categories. By default, there is one smilie category called Generic Smilies.

If you now click on View, you will be taken to another screen that shows you all the smilies in that category.

You have a number of options when working with smilies. These include editing a smilie, adding a smilie to a category, and uploading a smilie.

Editing a Smilie

Clicking on Edit allows you to change a number of the smilie's parameters. These include:

  • Title

    This is the title or name of the smilie displayed.

  • Text to replace with...