Inside: SereneScreen Fan Forum - View Single Post

feldon34 · 02-12-2003, 06:23 PM

Vish asked:

Is this forum designed completely by you? Or you have got a open source and customized it yourself?

This is vBulletin, the best (in my opinion) forum software on Earth. It's also very inexpensive and is all modular PHP + MySQL which is "editable source". You may not release edited versions of the code, but you are welcome and encouraged to make any modifications you wish and describe how to do those modifications at www.vbulletin.org. Some of the best hacks/add-ons to be found there are written BY vBulletin developers!

Although vBulletin is very customizable, you can install it and be up and running with a default board in 45 minutes. Then you start changing graphics, then layout, then eventually you might want to start doing alterations that require going in and changing PHP.

What I am doing here is nothing new. In the case of vBulletin, to improve it, you just have to throw some creative ideas and several hours of free time at the problem.

In a nutshell, the role of the PHP here is to prepare the information for display. Then the templates/HTML (which are external to the PHP files) format that information.

The benefit to this is that in going from, say, version vBulletin 2.0.3 to version 2.2.9 (a massive upgrade) you replace all your old PHP files on the server with the new files and run the upgrade scripts successively. This allows you to stay current with the latest without being prevented from personalizing the board.

Now, if you do end up wanting to do some more advanced modifications, this is where you would start altering the PHP files. The HTML and templates can't display anything that the PHP has not generated. So if you want to display some new information, you have to add some PHP somewhere to generate/fetch that information first!

At first I was leery of altering the PHP because every upgrade, from 2.2.1 to 2.2.2, 2.2.3, 2.2.4, 2.2.5, etc., you are supposed to download fresh copies of the PHP files. Then you need to go through them and make your alterations again and again. But now that I have gotten proficient at PHP, I keep a journal of every change to the PHP files (fortunately, this can be done in big chunks and you can just search-and-replace in most cases).

Despite the ~17 total PHP alterations (a quick, possibly inaccurate count), I was able to upgrade from 2.2.7 to 2.2.9 in about 2 hours. Considering these updates come monthly or less infrequently, it's not a big deal to me.

Some boards do have massive amounts of PHP modifications. In those cases, vBulletin does provide a changelog which you can look through and rather than scrap the PHP files, you can make the same bug fixes to them that the vBulletin developers have.

There are also programs like BeyondCompare which take 2 versions of the same file and annotate the differences in color.

I don't want to scare anyone away. Again, you can be up and running in vB in about 45 minutes and get some personality added to the board in less than 2 hours.

02-12-2003, 06:23 PM	#45
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	Vish asked: Is this forum designed completely by you? Or you have got a open source and customized it yourself? This is vBulletin, the best (in my opinion) forum software on Earth. It's also very inexpensive and is all modular PHP + MySQL which is "editable source". You may not release edited versions of the code, but you are welcome and encouraged to make any modifications you wish and describe how to do those modifications at www.vbulletin.org. Some of the best hacks/add-ons to be found there are written BY vBulletin developers! Although vBulletin is very customizable, you can install it and be up and running with a default board in 45 minutes. Then you start changing graphics, then layout, then eventually you might want to start doing alterations that require going in and changing PHP. What I am doing here is nothing new. In the case of vBulletin, to improve it, you just have to throw some creative ideas and several hours of free time at the problem. In a nutshell, the role of the PHP here is to prepare the information for display. Then the templates/HTML (which are external to the PHP files) format that information. The benefit to this is that in going from, say, version vBulletin 2.0.3 to version 2.2.9 (a massive upgrade) you replace all your old PHP files on the server with the new files and run the upgrade scripts successively. This allows you to stay current with the latest without being prevented from personalizing the board. Now, if you do end up wanting to do some more advanced modifications, this is where you would start altering the PHP files. The HTML and templates can't display anything that the PHP has not generated. So if you want to display some new information, you have to add some PHP somewhere to generate/fetch that information first! At first I was leery of altering the PHP because every upgrade, from 2.2.1 to 2.2.2, 2.2.3, 2.2.4, 2.2.5, etc., you are supposed to download fresh copies of the PHP files. Then you need to go through them and make your alterations again and again. But now that I have gotten proficient at PHP, I keep a journal of every change to the PHP files (fortunately, this can be done in big chunks and you can just search-and-replace in most cases). Despite the ~17 total PHP alterations (a quick, possibly inaccurate count), I was able to upgrade from 2.2.7 to 2.2.9 in about 2 hours. Considering these updates come monthly or less infrequently, it's not a big deal to me. Some boards do have massive amounts of PHP modifications. In those cases, vBulletin does provide a changelog which you can look through and rather than scrap the PHP files, you can make the same bug fixes to them that the vBulletin developers have. There are also programs like BeyondCompare which take 2 versions of the same file and annotate the differences in color. I don't want to scare anyone away. Again, you can be up and running in vB in about 45 minutes and get some personality added to the board in less than 2 hours. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman Last edited by feldon34; 02-18-2003 at 12:28 PM.