I will mention few reasons why I do not prefer vBulletin 4.0 any more

1. Theme development were (and may be is) a headache. If you want a single color change you may first have to search it using vBulletin's awful front end for CSS and then make changes at so many places. I do not prefer to do that. They have plans to better that in vBulletin 4.1.
2. vBulletin 4 is not very stable and has so many bugs. One of them was as simple as Ads in vbblog does not work. I know this is simple but if you are releasing a stable product which is late by 2 years I expect less bugs. This bug I reported was even in vBulletin 3.7+
3. I am not sure why but now vBulletin copyright in the footer is linked to vBulletin.com and not just plain text. I do not see a reason to do that.
4. vBulletin 4 intentions as I could sense was concentrating on SEO and so I expected better SEO on it but apart from just URL's everything for SEO was is crap.
5. I need brand new theme for vBulletin 4 as old theme becomes almost obsolete.
6. vBulletin is not only a forum but includes vBulletin CMS which is again complete piece of crap coding with tons of error. SQL are also not well written to say the least. Apart from that index.php file is not the default one for CMS and you are redirected to content.php and I could not understand why.
7. Pricing of vBulletin as a whole is crap. They used to charge same (Not anymore) amount for old version upgrade as a new license. Why on earth would I upgrade if I could get a new license. I raised the concern in the support and it took several months to get it sorted and now I do not plan to go either with upgrade or with a new purchase.

As we had no better alternatives than vBulletin I was certainly thinking what after vBulletin 3.8 reaches end of life which is nearing soon.

Now I have the answer.

xenForo

It is being developed by the vBulletin lead developer(s) and though it is still in alpha phase looks really promising to me. As I can see from the community it has all I want just in the alpha phase itself.

What are your views on the same? Share your views in comments.

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Blog Versus Forum

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Do let me know your views on the same.

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Could not find anything and so I had to do the coding myself but when I used the default Wordpress looping functions it had some issues on the category pages and the loop to show all posts interfered with the main page loop and so I had to do a new looping.

The below code will not interfere with any of the existing loops in the page and can even be used on 404 error pages.

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
 function gotourl() {
   // JavaScript function to change the user to the url of the author
   theSel = document.getElementById("AllPosts").value;
   if ("" != theSel) location.href = theSel;
 }
//-->
</script>
<?php
$featuredPosts = new WP_Query();
$featuredPosts->query('showposts=-1');
?>
<select id="AllPosts" name="AllPosts" onChange="gotourl();"><option>Select Your Celebrity</option>
  <?php
    while ($featuredPosts->have_posts()) : $featuredPosts->the_post(); ?>
      <option value="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></option>
  <?php endwhile; ?>
</select>

Enjoy!!!

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Why All in One SEO do this?

Now first question that comes to mind is why. Why does All in One SEO do this? The main reason I could see for doing this is majority of Wordpress templates have category and tags pages showing full post content and this actually mean that you have the same content on post and category pages and so having a "no-index", "no-follow" on those pages can actually help you from the duplicate content penalty.

So how to go about avoiding duplicate content as well as allow indexing of category and tags pages.

Do not show full content on category pages.

You should not show the complete post in your category pages and if you have theme which shows that I will suggest editing the theme. Check for the archive file in your theme folder and find the function the_content and replace it with the_excerpt.

Now as you have your category pages made more like listing pages install the All in One SEO plug-in for Wordpress and make sure you do not use the "no-index", "no-follow" for your category, tags pages.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to turn your Wordpress Category pages into an SEO gem.

Apart from All in One SEO plug-in there are lot of other SEO plug-ins and the one that I like the most is SEO Smart Links because SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding URL's.

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So here I am with a new product for vBulletin which actually makes your vBulletin registration 2 step registration processes by adding an AWeber subscribe as first step and in the second step he can register at vBulletin.

Before I describe about how to install the plug-in make sure you know basic of HTML. If you have no knowledge of HTML I can help you install this plug-in for you. Also remember this plug-in is compatible with vBulletin 4+ and I have no plans to make it work for vBulletin 3 currently.

Now let us begin.

Step 1

Generate an inline AWeber form but remember to have your vBulletin registration page as form thank you page.

Point to note here is the query string that you need to pass to your vBulletin registration page which is

?do=step2

Step 2

Download the plug-in and Upload startregister.php file to your forum root where you have your vBulletin's register.php file.

Step 3

Go to your forum admincp and import the product.

Go to AdminCP > Plugins & Products > Manage Products > Add/Import Products and import the product using the XML file attached in the zip file.

Step 4

After you have successfully imported the product you will see a new template called aweber_register in your Styles & Templates > Style Manager.

Edit the template to input your AWeber form details that was generated in step 1. We have used inline form in step 1 and so we have option of using Raw HTML for our AWeber form.

You will need to edit the following in the aweber_register template.

<!-- AWeber Tracking Image -->
<div style="display: none;">
 <img src="http://forms.aweber.com/form/displays.htm?id=jMycnEyMLOws" alt="" />
</div>
<!-- / AWeber Tracking Image -->
<!-- AWeber Hidden Form Fields -->
<div style="display: none;">
 <input type="hidden" name="meta_web_form_id" value="139921474" />
 <input type="hidden" name="meta_split_id" value="" />
 <input type="hidden" name="listname" value="mbaguys" />
 <input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="{vb:raw vboptions.bburl}/register.php?do=step2" id="redirect_2f5e6f9337080be57c07213dc55e3325" />
 <input type="hidden" name="meta_redirect_onlist" value="{vb:raw vboptions.bburl}/register.php" />
 <input type="hidden" name="meta_adtracking" value="BeforeVBReg" />
 <input type="hidden" name="meta_message" value="1" />
 <input type="hidden" name="meta_required" value="email" />
 <input type="hidden" name="meta_forward_vars" value="1" />
 <input type="hidden" name="meta_tooltip" value="" />
</div>
<!-- / AWeber Hidden Form Fields -->

You have to edit

<img src="http://forms.aweber.com/form/displays.htm?id=jMycnEyMLOws" alt="" />

This is for tracking of form display and submissions. You will see image code in your AWeber HTML form code which you need to replace in the template.

Content between the hidden div needs to be changed to your AWeber hidden field value.

<div style="display: none;">
 // Hidden Fields of AWeber.
</div>

AWeber arranges the hidden fields just under the <form> tag and you can copy them and replace with those in the template.

Step 5 (Optional)

You can edit the register template to make the email address on the original vBulletin form as read only so that user from step 1 of AWeber cannot edit email in vBulletin registration.

To edit the register template, find

<input type="text" name="email" id="email" maxlength="50" value="{vb:raw email}" dir="ltr" tabindex="1" />

Replace with

<input type="text" name="email" id="email" maxlength="50" value="{vb:raw email}" dir="ltr" tabindex="1" readonly />

Find

<input type="text" name="emailconfirm" id="emailconfirm" maxlength="50" value="{vb:raw emailconfirm}" dir="ltr" tabindex="1" />

Replace with

<input type="text" name="emailconfirm" id="emailconfirm" maxlength="50" value="{vb:raw emailconfirm}" dir="ltr" tabindex="1" readonly />

Support

I will be giving full support to this plug-in and if you have any difficulty just post your issues in comments. I will be more than happy to help.

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Do these websites actually register users?

I don't think so. The reason I say No is because I hardly see the site owners and admin hardly uses my email to generate any user based activity apart from on my birthday I get an email from all those forums where I am registered and vBulletin sends that automatically. Nothing for rest of the year.

So in my opinion these websites ask users to register for the sake stopping spam. Are you doing the same mistake or you want your user to be a part of your community.

Share your views in comments.

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This was not the case with me at Go4Expert.com because I send AWeber confirmation email as an invite for subscribing to newsletter but that may not be the case with everyone and so here I have a solution for double email confirmation of AWeber & vBulletin.

Let us begin...

Step 1: Stop vBulletin to send email confirmation

Assuming you have email confirmation ON in vBulletin forum you need to stop the email that is sent through the vBulletin system.

Open your register.php file in your forums directory and find the following.

// sort out emails and usergroups
if ($vbulletin->options['verifyemail'])
{
	$activateid = build_user_activation_id($userid, (($vbulletin->options['moderatenewmembers'] OR $vbulletin->GPC['coppauser']) ? 4 : 2), 0);

	eval(fetch_email_phrases('activateaccount'));

	vbmail($email, $subject, $message, true);
}

And comment out the following line

vbmail($email, $subject, $message, true);

Step 2: Configure AWeber to send user data to thank you page

We have stopped the confirmation email to be sent from vBulletin.  Next thing we should do is configure AWeber to pass user data to our thank you page.

Go to your AWeber list Settings page and provide thank you page URL and check on the box which says "Pass subscriber info". This way we can get user data on our thank you page where we will confirm the user in vBulletin.

Step 3: Your thank you page to confirm user

Upload thankyou.php into your forums root directory which will confirm the user when user clicks on the confirm link in AWeber. This has been tested to work with vBulletin 3.7+

Step 4: Hide some un-functional options in registration (Optional)

Optionally you may want to hide the option of "Receive Email from Admin" so user may not un-check that. If he un-checks it will have no effect in AWeber and so it is better to hide such options which can confuse the user.

<tr>
 <td>$vbphrase[administrators_may_send_email]</td>
</tr>
<tr>
 <td><label for="cb_adminemail"><input type="checkbox" name="options[adminemail]" value="1" id="cb_adminemail" $checkedoff[adminemail] />$vbphrase[receive_email_from_bulletin_board_staff]</label></td>
</tr>

You can remove the above code and replace that with

<div style="visibility:hidden"><label for="cb_adminemail"><input type="checkbox" name="options[adminemail]" value="1" id="cb_adminemail" $checkedoff[adminemail] />$vbphrase[receive_email_from_bulletin_board_staff]</label></div>

Future improvements

This is not just a plain plug-in but it needs a single line of change in code in core vBulletin file "register.php".

More Issues...

If you have any issues do post them in comments and I will be more than happy to help you get it working for you.

Try Aweber for $1 and see what it can do for your Forum

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AWeber Custom Parser

AWeber custom parser is exactly same as we used for phpBB.

1. Trigger rule should be your webmasters from address in your vBulletin and this is tested in Headers.

   From:[^\n|.]+SomeName\@domain\.com

2. Rule 1 to get email address from the sent email headers.

   \n[>\s]*E-mail:\s+(.+?)\n

3. Rule 2 to get username of phpBB forum as name in Aweber.

   \n[>\s]*Username:\s+(.+?)\n

Now Joomla members will be automatically sent a confirmation email from AWeber when they sign up on your site.

Still don't have AWeber? Grab it now for only $1.

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Create the Custom Parser

We now need to create a parser in AWeber to parse data from phpBB. Setup the following Custom Parser in AWeber.

1. Trigger rule should be your webmasters from address in your vBulletin and this is tested in Headers.

   From:[^\n|.]+SomeName\@domain\.com

2. Rule 1 to get email address from the sent email headers.

   \n[>\s]*E-mail:\s+(.+?)\n

3. Rule 2 to get username of phpBB forum as name in Aweber.

   \n[>\s]*Username:\s+(.+?)\n

Upload the Notification Plug-in

Create a new administrator in your forum with listname @ aweber.com as admin email. This will be a dummy admin because phpBB do not have any functionality to notify some email address about the new user registration and so you need to install this plug-in as well. You can download directly from my archive.

After you have successfully installed the plug-in test it to see that you as an admin get the notification of newly registered user and this will also mean that your AWeber account starts getting the notification.

Remember that this plug-in will notify all forum administrator's and so if you have quite a few administrator's you may need to edit the code of the plug-in for $admin_ary to notify only the newly created admin for AWeber.

All done and I hope this is helpful to all who prefer to use phpBB over vBulletin

Try Aweber for $1 and see what it can do for your Forum

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