vBulletin: A Users Guide

Creating and maintaining online discussion forums

Key Features

• Get your own forum up and running quickly
• Extensive coverage of the Administration Control Panel to put you on the right track for managing your board
• Customize the appearance of your vBulletin forum
• Change the site's behavior by developing and installing hacks

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Building Forums with vBulletin does exactly what it says on the cover. You will:
• Install and configure vBulletin
• Learn the your way around vBulletin with a thorough guided tour
• Customise your forum to meet the unique requirements of your community
• Administer users and posts, appoint staff to moderate your forum – or moderate it yourself
• See how to upgrade your vBulletin installation, or upgrade other forum systems to vBulletin
• Create a beautiful forum by designing templates or adjusting existing ones
• Install hacks to change vBulletin s behaviour or add new features – you will even see how to create your own hacks

Who this book is for

This book is written for new and intermediate users of vBulletin, who want to manage and maintain a vBulletin discussion forum as easily as possible. No experience of web programming is required.