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

Plugins and Products


One of the new features available in vBulletin 3.5 is plugins and products. Plugins and products are a new and easy way to add new features to a vBulletin installation.

There are some differences between a plugin and a product. A plugin allows new features to be added to a core vBuletin installation. In other words, it is a code snippet imported into vBulletin and executed by specific hooks. This is an easy way to extend functionality without making changes to the underlying PHP files of vBulletin.

A product is a downloadable package that contains notonly plugins but also templates, options, phrases, help files, and control panel entries. This means that these are a bigger, more integrated types of plugins.

Hooks are what drives plugins. These are locations within the PHP code of vBulletin that trigger events. These events can be used to run code contained in plugins. You can view these hooks from the AdminCP by clicking on Plugin System followed by Add New Plugin,...