Running your forums in multiple directories.
With vBulletin 4.1.1, you have gained the ability to run your forum components in different directories. This includes subdirectories of your primary installation directory and sibling directories. However due to the way that the forums and blog are implemented, it is a little different than other software packages. Implementing this on your site is fairly straightforward though.
Components Supported
Currently vBulletin supports running the CMS, Forum, and Blogs in directories other than your primary installation directory.
Uploading the files.
In your 4.1.1 package there are a number of new files located within the Do Not Upload Folder to implement this functionality. You need to upload these files first. Go into your Do Not Upload folder and you will see four subfolders. These are named – blog, forum, cms and rewrite.
You need to upload the folders that correspond to the components that you want to run in a sub-directory on your website. For our example today, we're going to concentrate on the forum directory. Upload this to your forum root directory using your favorite file transfer tool.
Using Mod_Rewrite?
If you are using mod_rewrite friendly URLs, you need to upload the .htaccess for your components as well. These are in the rewrite directory and get uploaded to their corresponding directories on the server.
Note: Only .htaccess files are provided at this time. If you are using IIS 7 with the URL Rewrite addon, you can import the .htaccess files within IIS Manager to create the appropriate web.config files. Consult the help files in IIS Manager for instructions.
vBulletin Settings
Once you have the files uploaded, you need to update some settings in your Admin Control Panel. Log in to your Admin Control Panel and go to:
Settings → Options → Site Name / URL / Contact Details.
Here you will find new options for the URLS of your different components. They exist for Forums, CMS and Blogs. These need to be set to the same directories that you uploaded the files to earlier.
Forum Component URL
If this is specified it will override the Forum URL setting for Forum specific pages. You may specify an absolute URL or a URL relative to the main Forum URL
Examples:
If vBulletin is located at http://example.com/vbulletin then entering a value of "forum" will result in the forum being located at http://example.com/vbulletin/forum.
A value of "http://www.example.com/forum" will result in the forum being located at http://www.example.com/forum.
All vBulletin URLs must have the same host name.
Cookies
You need to set your cookie path so that it is inclusive of all your vBulletin directories. If your cookie path is the default of '/' then you don't need to change anything. However if you changed this for any reason, it may need to be updated. For example, if vBulletin is located at www.host.com/mysite/vbulletin but the forum is located at www.mysite.com/mysite/forum then a cookie path of "mysite" will work, but a cookie path of "mysite/vbulletin" will not work because the cookies will not be sent to pages in the mysite/forum directory.
Note: Changing the cookies for your site will invalidate all cookies for your users. They will be logged out and must log back in.