Programmer's Reference

Finally, log into the forum. Everything should be working as normal.

If, during the server change, you changed the URL used to access the community, then you'll also need to change BB URL value. Log in to the administrator control panel, go to the vBulletin Options section, and change you BB URL to correspond to the new URL.

Graphics

The graphics that you see in a standard vBulletin installation are not standard graphics. They started life as 3D objects and scenes created in an application called Lightwave 3D. The resulting rendered images were then post-processed using Adobe Photoshop.

3D graphics work differently from normal graphics—the edges of the images do not end in a sharply defined pixel border. Instead they are matted to a specific background color. If you use the default background colors in vBulletin, then everything will be fine. However, if you change the background colors of the page, then you may need to do some work on the graphics. To make this easy the vBulletin developers have made available two versions of the Graphics Developer Kit. (You can download them from the vBulletin Members' Area.) The first kit contains fully prepared images, and all you need to do is choose the matte color and save the images. The second kit contains much larger layered images that allow you to make numerous changes to the look of the graphics before saving them.

Lightwave 3D and Adobe Photoshop

For more details on Lightwave 3D visit http://www.newtek.com/lightwave, and for

more details on Adobe Photoshop visit http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop.

Be aware, neither of these applications is cheap!

Global Post Text Find and Replace

This is something that many board administrators want to do but aren't sure how—messing with the database directly seems dangerous to many. It is quite simple though, and you can do it all through the AdminCP.

Log into the AdminCP, and in the left-hand menu click on Import & Maintenance followed by Execute SQL Query. If you are greeted with a message that says:

You are not authorized to execute SQL queries

you will need to add your user ID number to the line:

$canrunqueries = '';

in the includes/config.php file. For example, if your user ID is 1, this line will become:

$canrunqueries = '1';

Now you can run queries. To carry out a find and replace on all the post data in your board, you will need to run an SQL query like this:

UPDATE post SETT pagetext = REPLACE

(pagetext,'Vbulletin','vBulletin') WHERE pagetext LIKE '% Vbulletin%';

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