While previous versions of vBulletin have had template hooks which allowed administrators to insert data within existing templates, these have been revamped and improved in vBulletin 5 Connect. In older versions, you needed PHP code to pull, process and render your code or a sub-template and then pass it to the original template. In vBulletin 5 Connect, the system can do all that for you. All you have to do is create your sub-template and vBulletin’s engine will handle all the back-end work for you. To demonstrate this, I have create a little tutorial that will add a "Back to Top" link to the bottom of your footer navigation. Works on every page and doesn’t require any PHP code to pull URLS.

1. On the drop down in the Style Manager add a new template.
2. Give it the title of: footer_goto_top.
3. Add this code to the template and save it:
   Code:

   <style>
   #toTop {
     float:right;
   }
   div#toTop:hover { cursor: hand; cursor: pointer; }
   </style>
   <script type="text/javascript">
   $  (function() {
       $  (window).scroll(function() {
           if($  (this).scrollTop() != 0) {
               $  ('#toTop').fadeIn();    
           } else {
               $  ('#toTop').fadeOut();
           }
       });
    
       $  ('#toTop').click(function() {
           $  ('body,html').animate({scrollTop:0},800);
       });    
   });
   </script>
   ^ Back to Top

4. In the Admin CP goto: Products & Hooks -> Hook Manager.
5. Select Add New Hook.
6. Set the Hook Location to "footer_end"
7. Give it a title… Such as "Go To Top Link"
8. In the Template Name field enter footer_goto_top to reference the template that you made above.
9. Save your new template hook.

While this is a simple tutorial, you can do anything in your template that vBulletin 5 is capable of accomp"shing in templates. This includes API calls using the vb:data tag.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

Changing your old domain name to a new domain with redirect old to new:

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

This blog post is derived from a thread HERE.

Well it’s just about time I hit the ground running with another of my famous “journal” posts.

In the past they’ve been about upgrades and changes I’ve made on my main site, on vB4. But now it’s time to turn to vB5 and see what we can come up with.

My brief here, is that I can’t currently upgrade my main site, because it’s just far too heavily modified.

So I thought it’d be nice to set up a brand new site, and run it on the vb5 betas.

I’m not expecting any real traffic, it’s more to do with showcasing the software and playing around with it.

I have bought a new domain and a vB5 licence, so we can sit entirely independently of my main site.

So…here we go.
The url of the site is http://www.talknewsuk.com/forum/.
The theory is to run a news and current affairs discussion site that’s perhaps slightly more serious than the type of debate we’d get on my main site.

The initial intention is not to modify too much, because we’ve got regular beta releases, often with quite major changes, and so that would make things tricky. I had originally said NO changes at all beyond the colour scheme, but of course that didn’t last very long. However I’m not really going to modify any more templates until we are closer to Gold.

GREEN is the colour scheme used, and I have decided we’re just having the one. I have used the same shades that I use on a secondary style on my main site.

Let’s just do the one screenshot initially, to simply show the front forums page.

Click the below to enlarge.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

Hello,

how to:
Make your own vBulletin powered page without upload files or plugins. With SEO Friend URLs

Instructions :

1. create a template file with prefix custom_
2. put your page content the template that you have created.
3. now you can access the page from URL http://yourdomain.com/forum/misc.php…plate=yourpage name
i.e : if you have created a template named custom_Privacy you can access page with that URL.
http://yourdomain.com/forum/misc.php…mplate=Privacy (note: template name case sensitivity)
4. to make the page URL firend with search engine add that line to your .htaccess file after line (RewriteEngine On)

RewriteRule ^pages/([^/]*)\.html$   misc.php?do=page&template=$  1 [QSA,L]

5. now you can access page URL like http://yourdomain.com/forum/pages/yourpage.html instead of http://yourdomain.com/forum/misc.php…plate=yourpage

Done.:)
simple template structure attached below.

Ali.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

Many vBulletin sites have historically used some sort of portal, or even the vB4 CMS, as their default “landing” page if you visit the root URL….www.mysite.com, with no /forum etc.

Currently in vB5 there is no CMS, and there is no portal addon such as vBAdvanced.

So what do you do?

Well, you could simply rewrite the root URL so it points to /forum, or wherever your forum actually is.

That’s fine, but why not utilise the great new Site Builder feature in vBulletin 5 Connect, to create a custom home page and have people landing there?

Here’s how to do this.

Firstly, make sure you are logged in as an Admin – so you can access Site Builder.

Then, switch Site Builder ON using the switch at the very top right of the screen.

Now click “New Page” in the Site Builder Menu at the top.

You may need to enter your Admin Password to go any further:

Now, we should see the screen below.
We need to start off by making sure that any Announcements we add to the forum, will display on our new page.
So let’s drag the Announcement module into the top block on the new page (you can see the blocks outlined in dotted lines).

Having done this, we can now add something into the main block on the page.
Let’s keep things stgraightforward for now and put an Activity Stream in there.
Drag the Activity Stream module into the main block, as below.

You can now configure your Activity Stream in the normal way by clicking on the Pencil icon.

Now to complete our page, let’s insert a Who’s Online block over on the right hand side.

We’re almost done!
Now, let’s save our page.
Click “Save New Page” at the top.

In the “Save Page” box that appears, fill in the following fields:
Save the page name: Home Page
(This will be the name of the page that will display as its title)

Save the page URL based on the page name: home
(This will be the URL that you will use to access the page)

Template Option: home
(This will be the name of the template used to render the page)

Then click the green “OK” button.

You should now be able to test your new page by going to www.yoursite.com/forum/home

Now that we’ve created the page, we need to make the root domain redirect to this page, and to do this we needto edit the.htaccess file in the root folder for your site.

It is important to make sure you EDIT the existing .htaccess file, rather than creating a new one, otherwise you will break some of vB5′s core functionality and your site will not work!

The following code is based on your forum being in the folder structure www.yoursite.com/forum and your new homepage is at www.yoursite.com/forum/home. If you have different settings, please amend this code accordingly. If you’re not sure how, post in the vB5 support forum for assistance.
NOTE: Take a copy of your existing .htaccess file FIRST so you can restore it if anything goes wrong!

Add this code underneath whatever is already in your .htaccess file.
You will also need to replace www.yoursite.com and yoursite with your site’s root url.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com$  
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$  1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^$   forum/home [L]

Once you have saved and uploaded your edited .htaccess file, try visiting your root URL (www.yoursite.com) and you should be redirected to your new home page!

If you are happy with your page, you might want to add a ta for it into your navbar.
Click HERE for a tutorial on this.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

In this blog, I will show you how to create a “Latest Updated Topics” module, similar to the one you can see below on the official demo site:

First, make sure you are logged in as an admin, and ensure “Edit Site” is on in the top right corner of the page.

Make sure you are on the page you would like to add your module. I will add it on the main forum index, above the forum list.

Click “Edit Page” in the admin bar at the top.

Enter your admin password if requested.

Drag the “Search Module” box to to wherever you want to place the module…in this case, we will place it just above the “Latest Activity Module”, which is what displays the forum list.

It can be tricky to position it correctly…watch the red line that appears as this indicates the position.

Once positioned, click on the pencil icon to configure the module.

In the window that pops up, click “Switch to Advanced Editor”.

In the Advanced Editor that appears, enter the following:

Widget Title: Latest Updated Topics
Number of results: 5 (or however many you would like)
Search JSON:
Copy and paste the following code exactly and carefully:

{"date":{"from":"lastVisit"},"view":"topic","sort":{"lastcontent":"desc"},"exclude_type":["vBForum_PrivateMessage"]}

Click “Save Changes”.

Click “Save Page”.

Click “OK”.

Finally, click “Save Page”.

And that’s it! You should now have your “Latest Updated Topics” module.

If you require any assistance, please post in the vBulletin 5 Site Builder forum.

Thanks to Wayne Luke for providing the JSON code.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

This tutorial will help you to add a custom page that you have created using THESE instructions.

Firstly, make sure you are logged in as an Admin – so you can access Site Builder.

Then, switch Site Builder ON using the switch at the very top right of the screen.

Then, click “Navigation Bar” from the site builder menu.

Authenticate your admin session if required:

You will now be presented with the Navigation Bar menu.
Click “New Navigation Item”.

You will now be presented with the below menu:

In our earlier tutorial, where we created the custom page, we gave it a URL.
We now need to enter the following information:
Navigation Item Name: The text you want to actually appear on this navbar tab.
Target URL: The URL you gave this page. In our case, this was /home.

If you require this tab to open in a new window, tick “Open in New Window”.
To restrict visibility of this tab to specific usergroups, click “User Groups: Edit” and select the required usergroups from the below screen:

Back on the main screen, when you are happy click “Save”.
You can now see your new tab in the list of available tabs. You can drag these tabs up and down to reorder them to suit.

When you are happy, click “Save Changes” at the top.

Refresh your page, and test your new tab. If you have created both the page and the tab correctly, you should find your new tab highlights when the relevant page is being viewed.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

Your web host or vBulletin tech support staff have told you that your MySQL database for your forums is possibly corrupted. This thread outlines several methods for repairing the corruption.

Important Notes:

• If you are unsure of or do not entirely understand the below outlined steps, please contact your web host and ask they perform these steps for you. You can provide your web host with a link to this article.
• Repairing corruption in some instances means deleting corrupted data from MySQL database. So ideally you should always regularly backup your MySQL databases on your server or hosting account. And also make backups of your database BEFORE attempting repair in case repair deletes data which you may have other avenues or getting back if you still have access to a backup of the corrupted database state.
• Only real defence against data corruption is to always do regular backups your MySQL databases on your server or hosting account !
• MySQL database repair methods and process differ greatly between MySQL MyISAM and InnoDB storage engine tables. Most of the below outlined processes are for repairing MyISAM database tables. The most common method of repairing InnoDB storage engine is restoring the entire database and all tables from a recent backup (NOT just single or select few InnoDB tables – that won’t work and will mess up your database even more if you attempt to restore single or partial set of InnoDB database tables). Again, very important you have regular MySQL database full backups of your entire databases’ tables preferably via mysqldump within SSH telnet http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/m…nce_ssh_backup which is only available for VPS/Dedicated server owners. For shared hosting, ask your web host about MySQL database backups and what options are available to you.
• Ensure you have adequate disk free space on /tmp (for linux or windows equivalent) and mysql data directory partitions i.e. /var/lib/mysql (linux). You’d need at least 2x to 5x times the amount of disk space as the largest sized MySQL database table. So if you have 2GB sized post table, you’d need at least 4-10GB of free disk space on /tmp and/or /var/lib/mysql to perform optimize or repair operations. Otherwise you’d end up failing to repair or optimize your database and end up corrupting it even more.
• Any MySQL Database tables which use Memory storage engine such as cpsession or session DO NOT support repair/optimize so ignore any errors related to those tables not supporting repair/optimize
• You should run repair or optimize commands only against MyISAM storage engine tables and not InnoDB and InnoDB technically doesn’t support repair or optimize command and is mapped to ALTER table command to rebuild the InnoDB table (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/optimize-table.html). Frequently running optimize command against InnoDB storage engine tables will end up also bloating and increasing your disk usage if you are using the default InnoDB shared tablespace – where all your InnoDB table data is stored usually ibdata1 file in /var/lib/mysql. Very important DO NOT delete ibdata1 file !
  For InnoDB tables, OPTIMIZE TABLE is mapped to ALTER TABLE, which rebuilds the table to update index statistics and free unused space in the clustered index.

• While database repair or optimize is being run, your server cpu and resource usage loads will increase
• While database repair or optimize is being run, your forums performance will slow down, lag or hang when navigating the forums.

Repair Methods:

There are several ways to repair vBulletin forum MySQL database corruption:

• Method 1: Use mysqlcheck command line via SSH Telnet. Only VPS or dedicated server owners would have SSH Telnet access but it’s the best way to repair corruption if you have access.
• Method 2: Via vB AdminCP Control panel – may not repair all forms of corruption.

==========================================================================
Method 1: Use mysqlcheck via SSH Telnet for VPS/Dedicated server owners
==========================================================================

==========================================================================
Method 2: Via vB AdminCP Control panel – may not repair all forms of corruption
==========================================================================

Basically, web gui interface to access MySQL CHECK, MySQL REPAIR and MySQL OPTIMIZE commands.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

One of the largest new features in vBulletin 5 Connect is the Site Builder. It allows you to customize your site like never before. The Site Builder is a refinement of the Layout and Widget system used for the CMS in the vBulletin 4 Publishing Suite. With it you can customize most pages and create custom pages. One of the purposes of a custom page is to create landing pages for your website. These can be used to track advertising campaigns, provide various entry points or test new layouts easily.

To do this, we need to open Site Builder and create a New Page. You can do this from any location on your vBulletin 5 Connect Site. Let’s get started.

1. First make sure Site Builder is turned on by clicking the toggle to the left of your Username in the header of the page.

2. Now your header should look like this:

3. Click on New Page.

4. The system will give you a new one column page with three sections on it and show the Add Modules portion of the Page Builder. We’re not going to add any modules just yet. First click on the “Choose Layout” tab and select the 30/70 Two Column layout. Your page should look like this now:

5. Now let’s go back to the Add Module tab and add some modules. The top of your screen should look similar to this:

6. In the top section let’s put the Announcement Module. Announcements are a good way to provide information to your users.

7. In the left column, lets add an tag cloud, ad module, online users and the today’s birthdays module.

8. In the main column add the Static HTML Module and the Activity Stream Module.

9. Once you have your modules positioned we’re going to save our work. So let’s click “Save Page” at the top. Give the page a name like “My Custom Landing Page”. Notice the URL will automatically fill in. If you wish you can change it but let’s keep it for now. You’ll also have to specify a template name. So name your template Custom Landing Page, in case you want to use it again.

10. Click the Save Button.

11. Now you can edit the page again to configure your modules as desired. As you save each one it saves it configuration. While you don’t need to resave the page again when done, I always do just to make sure the changes take effect immediately.

Repeat the steps above for each page you want to create. Use the URL created when the page is saved to add the page to your navigation and share the landing page in campaigns.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs

vBulletin 5 Connect brings a modular design to building an online community. In past versions of vBulletin, the design of the site was rather static and there wasn’t an easy way to control where things are located. Editing the templates was time consuming and difficult if you didn’t know PHP. New pages usually had to be created with PHP code and addons. While these are still possible methods of customizing your vBulletin site, vBulletin 5 Connect introduces the Site Builder. This new tool allows you to build and customize pages without knowledge of HTML or PHP Code. You can easily create custom pages using only the mouse. However to understand how things are put together and to build new pages, a little background is needed. In vBulletin 5, there are four basic components to a generated page and the content it shows. These are Pages, Channels, Modules, and the actual content.

Channels
Channels are content containers in vBulletin 5 Connect. They are specialized nodes that allow you to build structure on the site. Channels can be several different types. These are Forums, Blogs, Social Groups and Special. If you have used vBulletin in the past, you can view Channels as an extension of the forums used in those versions. When you install vBulletin 5 Connect, there are a number of channels created. The Special channel holds things like private messages, albums, and other user content. You can control access to the different channels via permissions.

Pages
When using Site Builder, a page is where you build the display of your content. There are two types of pages in vBulletin 5 Connect. The first type are System Pages. These are the pages that are created during installation and provide the basic anatomy of a new website. Also each channel that you create will generate one or more pages to show its content. Some system pages can be heavily modified. Some like the registration page are faily static. The second type of page is the Custom Page. Custom Pages are any page that the Site Admins create to enhance functionality of the system.

Content
This is the actual content of your site whether it is Forum Topics, Blog Entries, or Group Discussions. This content is display in the various modules based on the options you set. You can display topics in a variety of Modules but the primary ones that will be used are the Activity Stream Module and the Search Module.

Anatomy of a Page
Each Page is made of of various elements to present the user with an interface to the site. Some elements are global to all pages. These include the Header, Navigation Bar, Breadcrumb, Notices and Footer. The rest of the Page is determine by the options you choose and the modules you configure.

Here is the basic layout of a vBulletin 5 Connect Page:

When you build pages, you will be primarily focusing on the Content area image above. Content is divided into up to three sections and we provide layouts with one or two columns at this time. Each section can contain multiple Modules and you control their positioning via drag and drop.

Page Layouts
The basic building block of a page is a Page Layout. Currently we provide three. These are:

• One Column (100%)
• Two Column with Left Sidebar (30/70%)
• Two Column with Right Sidebar (70/30%)

Modules
Modules are similar to Widgets in the vBulletin 4 Publishing Suite and Forum Blocks in the vBulletin 4 Forums. The main difference here is you can use the available modules on any page and in almost any section of the page. While the default system only ships with 12 modules currently, more will be added over time. The 12 modules it ships with are enough to build custom pages though.

Custom Modules
Several types of Modules (Search, Ad, Static HTML and Video) can be stored as Custom Modules. This allows you to customize them once and then use them on multiple pages.

Page Templates
The content area of each page is controlled by a Page Template. You can reuse page template or create a custom one for each page on the site. The Page Template is the stored value of your Screen Layout (1 or 2 columns) and the Modules that you have placed.

The Page is going to be the primary focus of Admins using Site Builder. Over the next few weeks, I’ll cover the different aspects of creating pages, building navigation and using other tools in the Site Builder in order to create a custom community.

vBulletin Community Forum – Blogs