Changing the Look of vBulletin

Buy your way out of work!

You don't have to bother about creating templates for yourself. If you fire up your browser and search for "vBulletin styles" or "vBulletin templates", you will find literally thousands of examples. Most of these are commercial so that you have to buy them, but there are quite a number of templates freely available for download—check out the vBulletin discussion forum for more details.

Template Lifecycles

A discussion board can go through one of two distinct template lifecycles. Which one it follows depends a lot on the administrator of the forum and what they are trying to achieve with it.

Lifecycle 1—Constant Change

This lifecycle is probably the more common of the two and probably accounts for many of the customized vBulletin boards you've come across.

This is where the administrator installs their copy of vBulletin and gets their forum going as quickly as possible. So, in order to minimize any delay between getting the discussion board installed and getting it working, they simply open up the forums for discussion using of the default style (or download and use another style that they fancy).

Then, with the board open and operational, the administrator sets about making incremental changes to the discussion board. They start off small, perhaps adding their logo, or changing a font color or table background. Then they start to make bigger, more significant changes. Then, at some point they probably install a hack or two onto the board.

By now the board is looking significantly different from the default that they installed maybe only a few weeks earlier. The cycle of development continues until one of three things happen:

•A new version breaks the customized template.

•The administrator wants to completely change the look of the site.

•The administrator is happy with the end result. (Hmmm, don't think that ever happens!)

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