Integrating a forum

First step is obviously forum installation. At the moment vldPersonals supports the following forum boards: vBulletin, phpBB2, phpBB3 and punBB. Follow your forum installation guide to set it up. Keep in mind though that your forum must reside on the same domain as your vldPersonals installation. For example if vldPersonals is installed at www.mysite.com, then forum can be installed at www.mysite.com/forum but cannot be installed at forum.mysite.com

Once your forum is installed, you can enable it in vldPersonals. To do that, login to the control panel and go to “settings » integrations” and click on your forum name in the “categories” box and set “enable” to “yes”.

In the “relative forum path” you must specify the location of forum from the point of vldPersonals. In the “relative return path” you must specify the location of vldPersonals from the point of your forum. You should not include a domain name in this box, only the actual path. A few examples:

If you have specified a table prefix or installed your forum into a database different than vldPersonals, make sure you fill in the remaining of the fields.

Now we need to check if everything works as it should. In vldPersonals control panel, go to “utilities » update counters” and synchronize the databases. The system will copy all members you have in vldPersonals to your forum. Once done, go to your forum and check if the number of members matches that in vldPersonals. If it does, everything worked correctly and you can try logging out and back in. If the number of members does not match, go through the above settings again and double check them.

You should disable the login function and member registration in your forum as it will be handles by vldPersonals. Any members who register through vldPersonals will be automatically created in your forum. Thus if in the future you choose to use your forum as a stand alone site, you can easily do that since all members have fully functioning forum accounts.