Tutorial: How To Set Up Vbulletin

Discovering the Best way to Set up Vbulletin

Vbulletin is an excellent, powerful, and completely customizable package used for forum site worldwide and with this tutorial, you can learn how to set up Vbulletin.  It is written in PHP which is the world’s fastest growing language for scripting. PHP is complemented by the most efficient and fastest database engine which is built by MySQL.  Vbulletin is the perfect community solution to sites regardless the size.

The Steps for How to Set Up Vbulletin

So if you are in need of knowing a bit more about the process of how to set up vbulletin on your site, then go through this post carefully and you will hopefully find all your answers.  Now follow the instructions step by step:

  • Download and install: the vbulletin software is available for download from its official website, which is www.vbulletin.com.  One thing you should know is that this is commercial software and you will have to pay for this.  There is no trail version or free version to download and use.

You will find two types of vbulletin license on their website.  One is owned and another is leased.  For the own license you will pay and get the ownership of that, but in the case of leased you will only get access to the software by paying leasing payment.  Once the leased period is up, you will have to pay for it again.  You will also need a fast and secure hosting option to use Vbulletin properly.

  • Installation preparation: once you have a vbulletin license and archive on the computer you can proceed for installing the vbulletin software.  Now extract the archive and find the folders within it.  Then, you have to upload these folders to your hosting account.  Before that, you will have to select the destination where you want to install it.  If you want to use your site only as a forum, then upload the contents in the folder named ‘public html’ in your account.

However, if you want your forum to be only a part of your site, then upload the program into a sub folder in your account.  Upload files from the *_upload_* folder to your selected location.

  • MySQL database creation: for this you will have to log in to your cpanel and click on the MySQL database icon. Clicking it will take to the database manager.  Now you will have to create the database with the name ‘vbtest’.  Make sure you use this name during installation, as well.

Creating the vbtest database site, you will have to choose a username and password for accessing the database.  During the installation, you will be asked to fill the database name, which will be something like ‘yourcpanelusername_databaseusername’, but the password will not be changed.  Now you have successfully created the database and your desired username for accessing the database.  We can move onto the next step in this how to set up vbulletin tutorial.

  • Installation Process: you have already uploaded the files, created the database, and now it is time for filling in the database details within the cpanel.  To do this go to the cpanel and click on file manager.  This file is generally located in the folder ‘includes’ in the directory where you already have uploaded the extracted files.  Cpanel’s directory file manager can be browsed by clicking the icons.  Once you have found the folder click on the ‘config.php.new’ file to see the actions.

Now, click on edit to customize the page.  Editing this file is considered the most important task of how to set up vbulletin.

At first, replace the text, which is in bold in the file with the name of your database.  After that, find out the user name title and replace with the user name you created earlier.  Next comes the password, and you just need to do the same thing, which is replace the password of your database here.

You should be careful while editing, that the sign <’> are still there as these are essential.  If everything is ok, then save the file.

  • Vbulletin installation through a web browser:

As the vbulletin application is ready to be launched open the web browser you use to do this. http://the_location_where_vb_is_uploaded/install/install.php is the target URL to be put in the address bar. If everything you did earlier was correct, then you will find a window where you will have to provide your customer information.  You have to copy and paste the customer number and click on the ‘inter install system’.

If you can provide the correct number, then it will take you to the first of thirteen installation steps.

The 13 Installation Steps for How to Set Up Vbulletin

How to Set Up Vbulletin

Step 1: Click on next and it will take you to the verify configuration page.

Step 2:  Again, click on the next installation button and go ahead.  If everything goes well then you will see the message of successful connection and existence of your database.

Step 3: For further setup click on next button.

Step 4: If the tables were successfully created, then it will take you to step four.  This is where the default database variables and encoding will be set up.

Step 5: in the fifth step, you will insert the data as sample automatically in the tables.

Step 6: In this step you will have to select the language, the default is English.

Step 7: Step seven you will import the theme of the default vbulletin through the auto installer.

Step 8: This step will import the help files for the administrator.

 

Step 9: This is the step where you will have to provide the details of your forum such as the title of the forum and the page title.  You can also change your administrator’s email address. It will be better for you to leave the cookie setting blank as it can make you unable to log in to your own forum if any setting are wrong.

Step 10: Here the details of your forum will be confirmed.

Step 11: Provide your desired administrator username, password, and email for further access and proceed.

Step 12 & 13: This step will take you to a page for confirmation and click next to finish the installation of vbulletin.

After finishing the installation, open your cpanel and go the directory where the files were uploaded.  Now enter the directory ‘install’ removing the file ‘install.php’ as this is a mandatory.  This is the final step you need to perform and you now know how to set up vbulletin.

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