Installation Help.

[Danger D]

Can someone plez give me some fairly straightforward installation instructions. I just d/l'd vBulletin Lite, and i dont really understand the instructions in the ReadMe.

If anyone could help, id be a happy happy guy! :D

[Cluster]

First, find out from your host if the server is running a MySQL server AND has PHP support. This is the most important part of the installation.
Without both of those items in place, you cannot use vBulletin.

If both of those are in place, then edit config.php with host-provided values, and that's it!

:D

[Danger D]

Thanks for the help, but im more of a newbie, than i let on....

Plez define "host" and MySQL and PHP support. How do i find this stuff out. Ive never used a board like this before. :(

[Steve Machol]

I don't mean any disrespect, but I really don't think you're ready to tackle a job like this just yet. You'd be much better off taking the time to learn your way around a computer first. It really is unrealistic to expect people to train you on the basics like this without first taking some time to teach yourself. Please take this as constructive advice and not criticism.

[Danger D]

No offence taken, although i dont quite agree with you. Support forums are idealy designed to *support* users whom wish to learn, or have problems.

Its not like im computer iliterate, or asking how to run Windows, im just not sure how to run this particular software. I host/admin an ezBoard community, but i was interested in learning vBulletin. I hope that someone can help me out, or perhaps give me the url to a good tutorial.

[Cluster]

I will try to explain this.

You're trying to run a bulletin board that should be accessible from the Internet. For it to be accessible, it must reside on an Internet-connected machine (called a "host") which listens for web requests and responds with web pages.
So to run a standard web page, you need an account with a host and you need to put your web pages onto that host -- then they become available from the Internet when someone types that host's IP address (like [url]www.rackspace.com[/url]) plus the path to your web pages (like [url]www.rackspace.com/~Danger_D/index.html[/url]).

Now then. Running vBulletin requires a little more than running a regular web page. vBulletin requires access to MySQL database, which allows it to store all kinds of data. Without the database, vBulletin has no way of storing any information, like usernames, passwords, threads, topics, preferences, etc. This is why having MySQL is critical. If you do not own the server on which you plan to run vBulletin, you will need to ask your host to either install MySQL if it's not already installed, or to make you an account on MySQL. You must have your own account, otherwise the bulletin board will be denied access to the database.

Now the question is, how does vBulletin access the database and serve dynamic pages? The answer is PHP, which is "a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML."

Both MySQL (database) and PHP (scripting language) are required for vBulletin, and once both of these requirements are satisfied, installing vBulletin is sheer pleasure.

I hope that helps. If you have more questions, feel free to ask.