Looking to extend your vBulletin community reach on Facebook?

Here are 3 Effective Steps on how to go about it.

Step 1: Integrating vBulletin with built-in Facebook Tools
vBulletin Facebook Connect Feature
The built in vBulletin Facebook Connect feature is one of the most effective ways to increase "Registration Rates" and promoting your vBulletin content due to the attraction of connecting the users Facebook account to your site via one click of a button.

Since implementing the tool 5 Months ago, over 850+ users have registered on my community through the FB Connect platform and has made Facebook.com one of the highest referring websites.

Installation
Click here for installation instructions or watch the video tutorial below.

Suggested Facebook Options Settings:
Go to your vBulletin Admin Control Panel -> Settings -> Options -> Facebook Options

Input the following settings for each option…

1. Facebook Usergroup (Create a usergroup for users who registered with Facebook so you can keep track of them and market effectively.)
2. Enable Auto-Register (Optional) – Yes
3. Publish to Facebook – New Thread: Yes
4. Publish to Facebook – Post Repply: Yes
5. Publish to Facebook – Blog Entry: Yes
6. Publish to Facebook – Blog Comment: Yes
7. Publish to Facebook – New Article: Yes
8. Like Button – Threads: Yes
9. Like Button – Blog Entries: Yes
10. Like Button – CMS Articles: Yes
11. Import Facebook Data: Biography – Biography (field1)
12. Import Facebook Data: Location – Location (field2)
13. Import Facebook Data: Interest – Interest (field3)
14. Import Facebook Data Occupation – Occupation (field4)

Step 2: Creating and Designing a Facebook Fan Page
To put it simply, Facebook Fan Pages are a way to connect with your "fans" on Facebook. The more fans you get to your page, the more popular your brand becomes.

Have you ever pondered why many companies these days are directing users to their Facebook Fan pages rather than their official websites? It’s because a Fan Page is not just an effective method of promoting products, but also a viable way of gathering a following to your "brand." So creating a page on FB is a very essential marketing strategy for anyone seeking to promote their community.

Creating a Fan Page
Creating a Facebook Fan page is pretty simple and straightforward – just follow this link…
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and follow the steps.

or watch this video…

Designing your Fan Page
There is so much flexibility when it comes to customizing and personalizing your fan pages that I can only really provide you vague advice on how to go about it.

Fan Page Examples
The first step to really getting started in designing a good looking fan page is to see how others have done it.

• Official vBulletin Fan Page
• FitDay.com
• RedBull
• Inspired Magazine
• Psdtuts+

Although the designs are unique, there is one common theme across all the given examples – promoting the "Like Button" on the landing page. Create an effective landing page by showcasing the "Like Button" through graphic images; telling your visitors to become a fan.

Creating a Welcome Landing Page
To create/customize a Facebook Welcome Landing Page, you need the Static HTML: iframe tabs (makes it simple to build custom iframe tabs)
Here is the app…
http://www.facebook.com/apps/applica…90322544333196

Here is a nice video walkthrough on how to make a landing page with it…

As I said before, there is much flexibility when it comes to designing Fan Pages and I can only provide vague advice. Make sure your page is as distinctive as possible, ensure the graphics, photos, images, and videos are precise and clear, with keyword rich content that are welcoming, informative, and very user friendly.

Here are more resources about designing your Fan Pages…

• How to Design a Kick-Ass Facebook Fanpage
• Customize Your Facebook Fan Page: Tips, Tricks, Applications
• Designing A Facebook Fan Page: Showcases, Tutorials, Resources

Step 3: Promoting your vBulletin Site + Facebook Fan Page
So you’ve successfully integrated "Facebook Connect" on your vBulletin site while creating a dynamic Facebook Fan Page – it’s time to promote both! A combination of these said tools will do great marketing wonders for you because they both compliment each other marketing wise.

Increasing Fans to Your Page
To increase fans to your page, you must effectively run a series of marketing tactics. Such tactics include..

1. Site wide announcement about your Facebook page in your forums. (Admin Control Panel -> Announcement -> Post New Announcement)
   
2. Implementing a direct link somewhere on your vBulletin site to your Fan Page.
3. Telling your existing Members/Fans to ask their Friends to like your page.
4. Posting Updates (General Prerequisites):
   • Post valuable information regarding your site or something that might interest your fans.
   • Post engaging updates. e.g "Suggest a feature you want for our site"
   • Linking your site (if applicable) to each update.
   • Posting frequency should be relevant to the value of the message. Do not post updates just to post them – else it would look like spam and you will lose followers.
5. Reply to all comments you deem appropriate.
6. Upload relevant pictures/videos on your Facebook page so users can tag them.
7. Purchase Facebook Advertising to promote your page.
   

Increase Facebook Traffic + Registrations to your vBulletin Site
As I’ve mentioned before, the vBulletin Facebook Connect + Fan Pages directly correlate to each other. With a combination of the above suggestions, plus the ones below, you can increase traffic + Registration to your vBulletin site.

• Implement built-in vBulletin Facebook Like System on your site. (From Step 1)
  
• Link your Facebook Fan Page to your vBulletin site.
• Join Facebook Pages/Groups relevant to your niche and link people to your threads. (Do not spam!)
• Ask your members to invite their friends from Facebook.
• Make the "Facebook Connect" button more prominent. You can design/enlarge it by replacing the Facebook Connect image (located in the images/misc/facebook_login.gif).

In conclusion, there are several and countless ways to marketing your vBulletin site on Facebook – I’m sure more ideas will be released/discovered as both platforms evolve with the web. These tips were just to help you kick-start your marketing on Facebook. The key to a successful marketing strategy is to experiment, analyze, and of course have fun with the product you are promoting!

If you have any personal Facebook marketings tips that you would like to contribute, please feel free to contact me (I will provide credit).

Thank you for your continued support!

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

By now you?ve probably already seen and perhaps even tried the all-new vBulletin Facebook application. (http://apps.facebook.com/vbulletincom/)

Content Relevancy

One of the major new features offered by the application is the smart social relevancy algorithm that is calculated based on the app user?s Facebook network of friends and personal interests. The social relevancy algorithm not only determines which content from your community is displayed to a user, but also which other boards are featured from the network. Your community and content become a dynamic part of a vast vBulletin Social Network and as a result promoted to new users based on their interests and activity.

Relevant Content Recommendations for Your App?s Users

Here is how it all works together. When a user installs the application for the very first time Facebook will prompt to grant the application privileges to collect the user?s profile information. If permitted, the application will collect general information about the user, their personal interests and generic information about their friends such as facebook ids. This information is sent back to the vBulletin Social Network service for processing, where it is matched to create relevancy recommendations based on newly discovered users? relationships and interests. This new relevant and valuable data is sent to your vBulletin Facebook app and is used to determine which content from your community is featured to your user as they ?Discover? and ?Explore? your site.

Let?s take a quick look at this transaction, here is an example of data collected:

?facebookid?;?friendsfacebookids?;?interests?

The sample record stored is something similar to this:

?100000087348584?;?10150801962190352?;?soccer,vbulletin,http://www.twitter.com/inetskunkworks,chess,ringflyers,mordor?

Promoting Your Community via vBulletin Social Network

In addition to the content relevancy logic benefiting your app?s end-users, your application connects your community into a vast vBulletin social community network. The ?Friends? Forums? container located at the bottom of the application will automatically recommend your community to your users? network of friends based on their usage of other forums / apps.

Example Use-Cases / Data Transactions:

The following is a general example as to how the Social Network Services uses Facebook data to create recommendations. For example, let?s say that:

1. On vBulletin.com, IBxAnders is user id ?257345?. On Facebook, IBxAnders is profile id ?100000087348584?. The service tells the app that id 100000087348584 is friends with ?jon doe? and ?jane doe? on Facebook.
2. It happens that ?jane doe? uses the ?Imaginary Forum App?, based on this information IBxAnders will see a recommendation in the ?Friends? Forums? section of his vBulletin.com app for the ?Imaginary Forum App?.
3. Let?s also assume that IBxAnders? friend ?jon doe? also uses the vBulletin.com Facebook App. Since the service matches the forum membership and the Facebook friendship information, IBxAnders will see more activity and content from ?jon doe? inside the vBulletin Facebook App.

Opting Out and Un-Installing

Opting-out of the vBulletin Social Network is easy. If the user un-installs the Facebook application, data associated with their activity via that particular application will be removed. In addition, the user can also opt-out from participating in the Social Network component via a UserCP setting in an individual forum. The UserCP setting will hide all activity on a particular forum from the Social Network component. (This setting group is not yet available on vBulletin.com).

A Basic Diagram of How This System Works

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

Comma Lists

These are the lists anywhere in vBulletin that have items separated by a comma – for instance the list of members viewing a form, or logged in members on Forumhome, or sub forum lists, or the list of a forums moderators. Since vBulletin 4 was released, it has been relying on CSS to space out and add the commas to these "comma lists", but this has proven to have flaws, and be somewhat unreliable across browser platforms.

Most of these lists have also been displayed using what are called "bit" templates – for instance, on a members profile page, to display the list of recent visitors vb gets the list from the database and loops round it, rendering each member individually using a "bit" template to build a formatted list, and then renders that list on the final page. If you have 25 members listed, that is 25+ template render calls. On some pages the list can be even bigger. Its a lot "work" for vb to render a template, so this process is a heavy use of resources.

in vBulletin 4.1.8, this system has been changed so that all these lists are built and displayed in a different manner. vBulletin will extract the data from the database, loop round it, and build an array of necessary values – this array includes the comma where necessary for each item except the last one. This array is then passed to the final template render, where it is displayed by the use of foreach template syntax – this takes the array given to it, and loops round it, item by item, and inside this loop we put the formatting that used to be in the "bit" template.

The final result is we get a formatted comma list that should display nicely in all browsers, and only one template render call instead of the 25+ we needed before. One final point – the comma (and space) used to separate the items is a phrase, so you can alter it to be whatever you prefer.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

These are the Stylevars that have been added or removed in vBulletin 4.1.8

Deleted Stylevars

editor_buttonclicked_background
editor_buttonclicked_bordercolor
Read full post at:
vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

The following Templates have been added or deleted in vBulletin 4.1.8

Templates Added

blog_taglist
forumhome_subforums
reputation_ajaxdisplay

Templates Deleted

usercp_groupattentionbit
usercp_groupinvitebit
memberinfo_visitorbit

Read full post at:
vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

Ive spent the last week adding new hooks into 4.1.10

The current [proposed] list has over 50 new hooks, as listed below ;

strip_bbcode
css_complete
template_render_output
cache_templates_process
attachment_process_start
bbcode_img_match

blog_latest_blogs_entry
blog_latest_blogs_query
blog_latest_comments_entry
blog_latest_comments_query
blog_rated_blogs_entry
blog_rated_blogs_query
blog_post_updateentry_complete

There are still a few outstanding requests, and still some template hooks to be looked at.

It should be noted that none have been included in the Alpha RC releases yet, and all of them are subject to change or review, but this should give a good clue to what is being added, and most should find their way to the final release (currently likely to be in mid to late December).

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

In this blog, and going forward in future blog posts we?re going to discuss basic concepts and work flow of vBulletin. There are very basic concepts of using the software that often get confused, interpreted wrongly, or you end up trying to going against what the normal workflow would be.

What is vBulletin, and how does it work?

vBulletin is a PHP and MySQL application. In its most basic form we have two parts to the software, the files which contain php programing, and the database which stores our information. It is important to understand that your vBulletin php files are the way that we (everyone who uses your site) interacts with the database. They do not hold any of your posts, threads, comments, articles, pictures, etc. One file does hold some very important information, which is the config.php file. This file holds all of the database connection information. You should keep a backup of this file, just in case you delete it or it gets mangled or destroyed somehow.

The most important thing to take away from this is that your database is 99% of your vBulletin installation. It is very important to keep backups, be willing to use them, and make sure they?re in good working order so when and if something bad happens you can get your site back on its feet ASAP. Often we have customers who keep backups do not check to make sure they?re in good working order, or want to go through great lengths to try not to lose a few days of content. We are sympathetic to your issue at hand that something has gone wrong and you don?t want to lose anything if at all possible. But if the fix is going to take an equal number of days to the lost content, what is worse: Forum down for 3 days, or losing 3 days of posts/threads?

Common misconceptions

There are a few common misconceptions we run into while providing support for vBulletin and that I?d like to take the time to explain here since we?re talking about the basics. These two are the big offenders: ?clean? upgrades and moving servers. We?ve talked about the fact that your board is 99% in the database, this means that if you?re moving servers you need to move the database. There is no need to install the software on the new host in the sense of when you did your first vBulletin installation. Your database backup contains all of the vital information, as well as instructions for MySQL to accurately recreate all of its stored information.

The same is true for ?clean? installations. Often you have a lot of old addons, or you?re going from one major version to another. You think to yourself ?I will install a new version of vBulletin and then restore my database!?. The problem with this is that you?ve just destroyed all of the work you did to your clean install, and created a monster of a hybrid database. You?ve got tables and schemas with the new version of vBulletin, and your old data. It will be almost impossible to upgrade this database, or even repair it and get it in working order.

Maintenance tools and what they?re there for.

vBulletin has a fairly wide set of tools available to help fix things, should they go wrong, or if something needs to be repaired. But it is very important to understand when you should run them if at all. The two big tools we?re going to talk about today are the MySQL repair and optimize commands that are featured in the software. Often people associate repair and optimize with a way to speed up their site when nothing is actually wrong with it. It?s important to understand what each does and why you should and shouldn?t run them.

Repairing a crashed table

The Repair function is present because sometimes, fairly rarely, a table in the database will crash. Here are some of the reasons why a table may crash, but be aware this is not a comprehensive list:

• Hardware failure
• Power failure
• MySQL crashed, or went down during a query that had not finished.
• External programs altering the MySQL data files.

MySQL Error : Table './database_name/post' is marked as crashed and should be repaired
Error Number : 145

The only case optimize is really needed is if you?ve removed (completely, so hard delete) a large amount of information from the database, either overtime or all at once. For example over the last year you?ve removed 10,000 posts and users. You may want to run an optimize command on the post and user tables to help MySQL reclaim some space it is still holding onto. You can run it just like we went over the repairing the post table in the previous section but you should choose optimize instead of repair.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

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