A Tour of vBulletin

How to Get to the Board?

First question that people have is "Where is the board?" The answer to this depends on where it was installed.

If you installed it into the root of your website, then accessing the site is all you need to do.

So, for example, if your site is at www.example.com and you installed vBulletin into the root folder, then just typing http://www.example.com into the browser will take you to it (the main 'page' of vBulletin is a file called index.php). Similarly, if you typed http://www.example.com/ index.php, you would get to the main page of the forum.

If, on the other hand, you installed the vBulletin software into a folder on the server, then you would need to access that folder. We installed it into a folder called vb, so to access this, we would use http://www.example.com/vb to get to the main page of the forum (or, if we wanted to type more, http://www.example.com/vb/index.php).

Getting to the AdminCP (Admin Control Panel) requires you to go to a different URL. Using the examples above the AdminCP would be at http://www.example.com/admincp or

http://www.example.com/vb/admincp (again the main 'page' here is index.php).

There is also a ModCP (Moderator Control Panel). Getting to this requires you to go to yet another URL. Using the examples above, the ModCP would be at http://www.example.com/modcp or

http://www/example.com/vb/modcp (once again the main 'page' here is index.php).

What the End Users See

OK, you know where to go, but what do people see? Well, this is what a visitor to your vBulletin site sees if they are new and aren't already logged in:

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Chapter 3

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A Tour of vBulletin

Site Logo

At the top left of the page is the logo for the discussion board. By default this is the vBulletin logo, but it is easy to change. (We'll show you how later.)

Forum Title, Login Box, and Navbar

Below that, you have the forum title and login box. The Remember Me? box is checked by default, and when members log in, their details are saved to a cookie so that they can access the site at a later time without logging in again.

Below that, we come to the navigation bar, also known as the navbar. The job of the navbar is to put tools and functions within easy reach of the user.

The navbar makes use of expanding and collapsing panes in order to save on precious screen space. Clicking on some of the links (marked by a downward pointing arrow) causes the panes to open, while moving off them causes them to close. The contents of the navbar changes dependent on whether the user is logged in or not.

Welcome Banner

Below that, are the forum welcome banner, the introduction to the discussion board and the forums themselves. The welcome banner and introductory message are only shown to unregistered users (or members who have not logged in).

Main Body of the Forum

Below this, comes the main body of the discussion board. This is where the forums appear. To get you started, there's one already created.

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