vBulletin is trying to destroy my sanity

September 2, 2008 7:23 AM

I have recently dived into the world of styling vBulletin forums and have discovered homicidal tendencies I didn't know I had. Please send help in the forum of guides, tutorials, and reference documents.

The vBulletin manual is woefully lacking in anything past the most basic information and there's a whole lot of counter-intuitive or obscure "magic" going on in the templates—how was I to know, for example, that the $navbits variable would only be accessible to the navbar template, and not anywhere else? Or that when a template calls $threadbits, it performs the inclusion of a separate template and looping through all threads on the page automagically, and doesn't really act like a variable at all? Where are the $thread and $forum variable arrays documented? I've just spent half an hour trying to find a way to get the URL for the forum a thread is in, WITH NO LUCK. This is a ridiculous state of affairs.

Either documentation is completely lacking and you have to just try things via trial and error, or else my Google-fu is supremely lacking. I hope it's the latter. Please post any and all decent vBulletin resources that will shed some light on how to handle templates and styling properly. Things like variable references (and COMPLETE ones, please, not the "complete list of variables!" lists that somehow forget to include the most basic $thread and $forum vars), template inheritance trees, and stuff like that, as well as walkthrough tutorials and basic hack guides (not for the specific hacks but to familiarize myself with the general way vBulletin works).

posted by chrominance to computers & internet (1 comment total)

I use vbulletin.org at least several times a week. I don't know if it has the comprehensive resources you're looking for, but it does have a lot of people there who use vBulletin every day, and many posts that might apply to specific questions you may have.

FWIW, I typically work with a developmental copy of a live vB board. If I really get stuck, I end up editing the script and sticking in "print_r($vbulletin)" -- yes, really, and it produces a humongous page listing nearly all the variables -- or maybe "print_r($bbuserinfo)". Then I use Ctl-F to search for the particular name-value pair that I need. I know it's nutty thing to do, but it works.
posted by Robert Angelo at 3:52 PM on September 2, 2008