How long?

[deronsizemore]

For someone who has no experience what so ever with VBulletin (me), how long can I expect it to take me to set up a forum site? I know we all have different abilities and skills, but I'm just looking for a round about time frame here. I mean is it pretty straight forward, or are we talking messing around with a lot of code and programming?

[Sean]

It really depends on what your desired setup is.

To just set up the forum with all the default stuff takes maybe 5-10 minutes or so... just editing a config file and upload. Then you can just go into the admin panel and setup stuff from there. You can also just edit the images and upload them over the old images if you want to keep that same vBulletin style. (I think WSP forum is basically the VB style with different colors and a few changes).

If you get mods or changes or whatever from the VB site or vbulletin.org, they are usually pretty easy to setup.

Complex custom modifications can take a while to figure out and work out all the bugs.

If this post sounds a little jumpled, I'm tired. heh

[deronsizemore]

Got ya. Thanks. :)

[Cutter]

I started out with phpBB, and upgraded it to vBulletin less than a month later. The install plus upgrade I finished in an evening. But I'm still messing around with mods and plug-ins to get the board to function the way I want.

vBulletin looks confusing at first, but after a few days of playing with it you will actually feel far more comfortable with it than something simple like phpBB.

[LuckyShima]

You can have it ready to go quite quickly. You really just need to create the MySQL database, then customise the approriate fields in the 'config' file with such things as your database name, table extensions, and forum address, and you are ready to install.

Then, once installed, you only need to create the forums you want and you can get started.

The forum comes with a standard 'vbulletin' set up that you can see here: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/

You only really need to change the logo in the top left corner, just change your own logo pic to 'vbulletin3_logo_white.gif' and put it in the "images_vb3/misc/" folder (as you can see is the path for the default vbulletin logo), and you will have the beginnings of your customisation.

After that, it can take a bit of time stepping through all the options, having a look at what you can set, what you have control over, understanding how you can manage your board. That just takes time, but it is fairly self-explanatory.

Then, after you understand how the board works, you can investigate the plug-ins and code modification hacks at vbulletin.com or vbulletin.org.

[deronsizemore]

Cool...thanks everyone for the help. This is more or less what I thought, but just wanted to make sure.




The forum comes with a standard 'vbulletin' set up that you can see here: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/


Nice...I think for my needs, the standard one will do just fine.

[Mike Empuria]

I've just installed it on a site for my wife and I'm still trying to get over how easy it was. The support from the forums is also very good.