In this tutorial I will guide you through the steps of installing a vBulletin forum, I will point out what’s important and what’s not that important or what you shouldn’t be changing at all.

Important notice!

vBulletin is not free software, you must first buy a license in order to use the vBulletin forum. Our vBulletin version we will install here is version 3.8.1

Install a vBulletin system

Once you purchased a license and downloaded the vBulletin package to your computer, extract the zip file.

After extracting you should see 2 folders.

• Copy everything within the upload folder.
• Go to your wamp www directory.
• Create a new folder named vb and paste all of the files in the folder.

Before we start the installation we must create a database, go into your phpmyadmin and create a database named vb.

The next step is to create the configuration file, go to the folder includes and find config.php.new. Make a copy of that file and rename it to config.php

Now open the config.php you just created. There are several options you must edit to make a connection with the database.

• The first option is the name of the database, in our case we named our database vb
• If you want to use a table prefix you can specify this (eg: vb_), we will leave this blank. The table prefix is usefull if you need to install extra tables for another CMS system in the same database.
• The technical email address is also very important to fill in. When you have for example a database error, this email will be used to keep you informed about this.
• Last but not least you must specify the username and password required to connect to the database. We are working locally on our wamp so our username is root and there is no password.

Once you edited the configuration file go to http://localhost/vb/install/install.php, you should then see the following screen which askes your customer number to proceed with the installation. Fill in your customer number and click Enter Install System

Your installation will start and at this point you will just have to click next untill you come to step 9. In step 9 you can edit certain aspects of your forum like the BB title, homepage title & Webmaster email address, then click proceed.

Unless you know what you are doing leave all the other options to their default values.

At step 11 you will need to create a super admin account, choose a username and a VERY GOOD password and make sure to add your e-mail address to receive e-mails from other forum members.

What is a good password? A good password is a password with at least one number, one special charachter a capitalized charachter and a minimum of 8 letters. In this tutorial we kept it simple and used test as password but a good password would be something like Te$t57!.

Proceed untill you arrive at step 13 which tells us the installation is complete and we have to delete the install/install.php. I personally always remove the entire install folder but that’s up to you.

Let’s go to our admin panel, browse to http://locahost/vb/admincp/index.php and login with the super admin account you created.

Open the vBulletion options tab and click the first option in the menu which happens to be vbulletin iptions. The vBulletin options will show you a list of settings you can modify to suit your needs. Just select one of the options and click on the button Edit Settings

Change the default horizontal user stats & post to vertical

Something I looked for when I first installed vBulletin is how to change the post so it would display the user information to the left and the post on the right instead of on top of eachother.

This is how the posts looks like by default:

The good news is that you don’t need to change anything in the template code itself, all you need to do is go to vBulletin options-> style & language settings and look for “Use legacy (Vertical) Postbit Template” and set the option to yes.

Now the user stats will appear on the left of the post. But pay attention, when modifying the template you should not edit the postbit template but the postbit_legacy template