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

Preparing for Upgrade


Before you upgrade anything, you need to backup your database with the data for the forum. We saw how to do this in Chapter 5.

As well as a database backup, make an up-to-date copy of the files on the server—preferably a full server backup of all files and folders, just in case something goes wrong or you upload the files to the wrong location and overwrite non-vBulletin files.

Note

Backup motto

Note

It's better to have made a backup and not need it than not to have made one and find that you do!

The next stage is to extract the files from the compressed archive that you downloaded. Extract them to a separate folder on your system.

Once you have done this, locate the folder called upload, and rename it to match the name of the existing vBulletin folder on your server (in our case vb).