One of the most important things that you will need to think about when you have any website is creating a back up for the site. Of course, with vBulletin, this is absolutely no different and you will have to create a backup of your forum every so often. There are a few ways that you can do this and it is a lot easier to actually do than you might think.

Back up from vBulletin Admin Panel

One of the ways that you can back up your vBulletin website is actually from the admin panel. All you need to do is to navigate yourself to Maintenance, then Database Backup in order to start. When you get to the page, you will need to choose the databases that you wish to backup. You can select that databases that you would like to backup by simply selecting the heck boxes that are next to the names of the databases. You should note that you should only choose this method if you have a relatively small forum as it will output the entire database straight to you. If you have a larger forum, you should output the backup to a server.

Backup using PhpMyAdmin

Of course, another way that you can back up your vBulletin website is using PhpMyAdmin. All you need to do in order to do this is to log into your PhpMyAdmin control panel and then select the name of the vBulletin database that you would like to back up from the drop down menu. All you need to do then is to click the export tab and your database will be backed up and exported. The best thing to do is save the output as a file on your computer and then you can be sure that you have the file backed up.

Of course, there are a few other ways in which you can back up your vBulletin database but these two are by far the easiest in our opinion, and the safest.

vBulletin has now become one of the internets most respectable community software and an extremely powerful one at that. The majority of top forums are powered by vBulletin and we have put together a showcase to show you some of the forums designs that stand out.

1. SitePoint

One of the worlds most prestige and well respected webmaster forums, it was the first to introduce pay to list in their marketplace or formally known as ‘Flippa’ now.

2. Warrior Forum

The internets leading internet marketing forum, averaging over one thousand members on at a time.

3. The Student Forum

Every student in the UK has bound to know of this forum, where else do they spend their free time other than parties?

4. UK Business Forums

Another quality forum UK webmasters have produced for all the businessmen of the UK.

5. Nokia Forum

A very simple, but stand out design by Nokia.

6. Think Broadband

A large forum with a great design that really stands out due to its web 2.0 background.

7. Splash Damage

A gaming forum with a very stand out background and simple layout throughout the forum.

8. Web User

One of the UK’s leading technology forums with a stand out design and simple layout.

9. Forum Flux

A forum for vBulletin skins with an outstanding simple, but minimalist design that makes it stand out.

10. MacRumors

If you have never heard of MacRumors, you don’t deserve to be alive. The largest rumors website for Apple.

Here’s a how-to.

First of all download carp from here: http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/

I am using the free version and it works perfectly. Unzip the carp archive (zip) and upload the carp folder to your forums home directory. Upload the carpsetup.php to the same directory as of your showthread.php (forums home) folder. Run the setup file, it will give you two choices.. 1) directory cache and the other.. mysql cache. I am using directory cache and I recommend you to try this one.

When you hit next, carp will install cache folders to your carp/ directory. If you don’t see any errors here then the setup is complete, you should now delete the carpsetup.php from the forum home directory and carpsetupinc.php from your forums/carp/ directory. If you encountered any errors here then it’s highly likely that you need to change the directory permissions for you /carp folder in order allow the script to create cache directories.

Now the rest of the process is fairly simple, as described by nevetS at vbulletin.org.

Open your admincp (vb) and create a custom profile field. It should be Single-Line text box. Click next and fill the fields. Give it an appropriate title/description, i.e:

For title: Blog Feed
For description: Enter your Blog’s RSS feed URL here i.e. http://myblog.com/rss.xml

Leave the default value field empty. Change max length allowed for user input to 200. Field should be editable by user, not a private field, not searchable on member list and do not show on member list. Leave the regular expressions field blank. In the Display page option below, set it to Edit profile and click save.

Now add two plugins in your admincp’s Plugins and Products >> Add new plugin. For the first plugin: Selected “global_start” as your hook location, give it an appropriate title (can be anything) and paste the following php code in the plugin php code area:

require_once 'carp/carp.php';CarpConf('cacheinterval',120);/** You may want to set a cachepath specifically for your forum **/CarpConf('cachepath','carp/');CarpConf('cacherelative',0);/** You can omit the above two lines without a problem **/CarpConf('cborder','');CarpConf('poweredby','');CarpConf('maxitems',1);CarpConf('iorder','link');

Set the plugin to active and click save.

Now it’s time to add the second plugin:

Attach it to postbit_display_start as the hook location, give it a title & paste the following code in the plugin php code area:

ob_start();CarpCacheShow($post[field5]);$blogentry = ob_get_contents();ob_end_clean();

Set the plugin to active and click save.

Now open your postbit template:

FIND

				<if condition="$post['usertitle']"><div class="smallfont">$post[usertitle]</div></if>

ABOVE ADD

				<if condition="$post['field5']"><div class="smallfont">Recent Blog: $blogentry</div></if>

Save your template. Now to test it, go to your usercp> edit profile and scroll down, you will see the Blog Feed option there, add your blog’s rss feed and hit save changes. Now go to your forums and look for any of your post.. you will see the latest blog link below your username.

If you encounter any problems then post a message here and I will try to fix it accordingly.

Credit goes to nevetS for the mod.

If you would like to change the color for a usergroup you can do it by going here :

Admin CP -> Usergroups -> Usergroup Manager -> Edit Usergroup -> Username HTML Markup

And by adding html markup. For example, in the first box add :

<span style= " color:red ">

and in the second one close it with

< span >

That should be all.

Most vBulletin users either think they have to leave powered by vBulletin in their vB powered forum title or they do not know how to do it, well, you can remove it from your forum without the need to pay vBulletin to remove it, its the footer signature you need to pay if you want to remove.

Now that we have just reinstalled this forum, the powered by vBulletin is back on, here is how I removed it:

1. Login to your vBulletin control panel
2. In Phrase Manager, search for phrase variable: x_powered_by_vbulletin
3. It looks like this when you found it {1} – Powered by vBulletin
4. copy and past {1} to the impute box as indicated in the attached image
   
5. Save changes and you are done

Nice simple tutorial here on how to change the postbit into a legacy format – down the left side not across the top.

Just go into:

Forums > ACP > vBulletin Options > vBulletin Options > Use Legacy (Vertical) Postbit Template > Yes

And your done

It is recommended you read this first: Make an image preloader script
Now that you have done the preloading script so the graphics load properly you need to actually add the script for the mouse overs. For the most compatibility I prefer to use JS & CSS.

To do this you need to add this code to your page:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--changein = function(target){    document.getElementById(target).className = 'nav_hover';}

changeout = function(target){    document.getElementById(target).className = 'nav_normal';}//--></script>

What this does is get’s the target element and changes it’s class to the hover class or if it already is the hover class changes it to the normal class.
Now you need to add the following classes to your CSS code:

.nav_hover{

}.nav_normal{

}

Add code in those 2 classes as you require. If you need any help then just ask here or make a new topic in the modification questions forum.

Now that you have the classes and the script you need to add what you want to actually change. Lets say the text is in a div. Here’s an example of what it may look like:

<div id="home" onmouseover="changein(this.id); onmouseout="changeout(this.id);" class="nav_normal"><a href="home.html">Home</a></div>

Now to explain; first of all we define the id. The we say when the mouse comes over the div execute the function to change it’s class. You may also notice the “this.id” that fetches the id of the div the code is in and uses that as the target. When you move the mouse out again you can see it uses similar code to revert the class back to normal. Then you can see the class which would be the normal class before you put your mouse over it – nav_normal.

I hope this tutorial was enlightening

This isn’t really as much a how to as a copy and paste job but as long as it works for you hopefully you’ll be happy.

Step 1:
Open up your desired vB template or html file. Add the JS opening tags:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--

Now we need to define the actual image loading function:

function newImage(arg) {    if (document.images) {        rslt = new Image();        rslt.src = arg;        return rslt;    }}

Next we define the “other” image preloading function.

var preloadFlag = false;function preloadImages() {    if (document.images) {        image = newImage("X");        preloadFlag = true;    }

}

Change X to the path of your image.
Then finish off the JS:

//--></script>

Now you need to trigger the image preloader to do that you need to put the following in your <body> tag:

onload="preloadImages();"

And your done

Only tested on v3 Arcade 1.5.8:
1) Go into ACP > Plugins & Products > Plugin Manager > Awards Plugin Postbit > Edit
2) Find:

add before:

3) Find:

add after:

5) Open up your postbit/_legacy template and find:

                <div>                    $vbphrase[posts]: $post[posts]                </div>

add after:

<if condition="THIS_SCRIPT == 'showthread'"><div>Number of Arcade Awards: $post[awardnum]</div></if>

and your done

Random Image/Banner Rotater

1.) Get some images and put them in a folder called images and then upload them to your webserver.
2.) Open a php editor or notepad/wordpad and type in the php starting tag:

3.) Now to set up your images array:

4.) Now you have to pick a random number:

This picks a random number between 0 and 9.
5.) Now you have to put that number to use and select one of the values out of the array as well as echoing it out:

6.) End the php tags: