Installing the vBadvanced vBulletin Portal
by Scott Clark
October 08, 2009
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Want to build a site around your forums? Read on to learn
how to get started with vBadvanced.
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Introduction
You may have a site that is currently running the popular
vBulletin discussion
forum software, and would like to create a site that's built
around the forum community. While there are many vBulletin
CMSes available, such as vbPortal and vbIndex, vBadvanced
offers many social networking features, and it's free! This
tutorial will walk you through the steps of installing and
setting up vBadvanced on your site.
We are going to assume that you already have an
installation of vBulletin installed and running on your
site, and that you are ready to begin the installation of
vBadvanced. Obviously the first step is to download the
installation package from the vBadvanced website. You do
that from their Software Products
page. The download package is fairly small, and only takes a
minute or two.
You'll want to unzip it into its own directory, usually a
subdirectory from your website's main directory. Then you'll
go into the vBadvanced directory (which we'll call "vba" in
this tutorial). In that directory, you'll see another
subdirectory called vBadvanced CMPS (which stands for
Content Management Portal System). Go into that directory,
and open the readme_vba_cmps.html file--this contains a list
of features as well as installation instructions. By reading
this tutorial, you'll be ahead of the game!
If you will be installing the vBadvanced software in the
same directory as your vBulletin forum software, you can
proceed to the next step, which is uploading the vBadvanced
files into your vBulletin forum directory. If not, you'll
need to edit the file called cmps_index.php and locate the
following line:
$forumpath = '';
In between the quotes you'll enter the full path to your
vBulletin installation. If you don't know the specific path,
you can use a little utility script called "forumpath.php"
that ships with vBadvanced that's located in the Extras
folder of the vba directory. You'll have to upload that file
into the main directory where your vBulletin forum lives
using your favorite FTP client, i.e. into the /forum/
directory (assuming that your forum lives in a directory
called "forum"). Once you have uploaded it, you will open
your web browser and go to that file, like this:
http://www.yoursite.com/forum/forumpath.php
The resulting screen will show your complete forum path
(and ONLY the path), and you will need to copy and paste
that path into cmps_index.php file's $forumpath
variable line that we discussed previously. It will look
something like this:
/home/homepages/0/c208940392/htdocs/yoursite/forum
Note that you'll need to upload the /forum/images and
/forum/cpstyles folders in binary format, and the rest will
be upload in ASCII format. Once you've set the path (or have
uploaded all the files into your forum directory), you'll
need to make sure that the modules subdirectory is
chmodded to 777. Now it's time to start the installation
procedure itself. You do that by going to the following file
(changing the names to reflect your own site's name):
http://yoursite.com/forum/admincp/vbacmps_install.php
It will ask you to log in using your normal vBulletin admin
login and password, and it will check to make sure that you
have plugins enabled in your vBulletin software. You do that
by going into your vBulletin admin page, Options,
specifically the Plugin/Hook option. Once it's enabled, you
will be able to install vBadvanced. Once that is done, you
will be presented with the following screen which will let
you either install, upgrade or uninstall vBadvanced.
Click here for larger image
In this instance, we are setting up a new installation,
so we select the "Begin the installation process" option and
move on to the next step. The vBadvanced installation script
will add some new tables to your vBulletin mySQL table, add
the CMPS to the vBulletin admin console, add new fields to
the tables it installed in the database, and add various
other required items that will allow you to move on in the
installation process. You click "continue" and move on to
the next step, which is to temporarily turn off your
vBulletin forum. It then adds some additional items to the
vBulletin table, and then turns the forum back on.
The next step of the installation process verifies the
correct paths for icon images. If they are already correct,
which is most likely if you installed into your forum's
directory, then you can move on to the next step. If not, it
will attempt to correct the paths itself (which it did in my
case). Then you just click Save, and again, move on to the
next step. It will go through this process three times
(checking image paths), and then you will be informed that
the installation is complete.
The final step is to delete the
"vbacmps_install.php" from the admincp
subdirectory, and then log into the vBulletin Admin CP to
check it all out! To get to your new installation, you will
go to the "cmps_index.php" file that is located
in your vBulletin forum's directory, i.e.
http://yoursite.com/forum/vbacmps_install.php
Congrats! Your vBadvanced CMPS is installed and ready to
use! In our next article we will discuss the various options
that you can use with vBadvanced, such as menus, articles,
file sharing, user blogs, ratings, user favorites, e-mail
subscriptions and more. Then we'll show you how to customize
your vBadvanced installation by creating custom usergroups--
with each usergroup having different privileges and features
available to them!
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