USAFA Community site

[evrl]

I found your site way back when I wanted to create this site I finally got the nerve to create. It is a forum site (vbullletin) with CM pages (Vbadvance) I never would have had the confidence to do this if I had not found your site and this forum to inspire me to do it. It is not for profit, although I will be seeking donation eventually as the cost of creating and maintaining is beyond what I can keep up on own.

I created this site because I saw a need for a site like this as a Parent of a Cadet in United State Air Force Academy. The name USAFAcommunity.com has help tremendously for people of the USAFA community to be drawn to it and check it out. I have lots of methods for getting the word out as I am a parent and thus a part of the community so I have my sources! I have over 525 members in less than 4 months since it was opened. It has been fairly active.

Biggest issue I am running into is Parents and others not understanding how to navigate a froums site! They just do not get it. Many belong to yahoo groups and are used to signing up and receiving instant email notification. The cannot get past a thread they happen to click on and are not sure what to do next. I have a Newletter mod installed that is pretty cool and allows me to send a newletter w/ snippets of post and information. But when people click on it and are in middle of thread they do not know what to do next. Any suggestions? I have started making video tutorials using a screencast application and that has helped some. But they are pretty primitive. I know there has to be easier way to educate!

Also intially I had some help installing an customizing Vbulletin and some mods. I have done a lot on my own since then through trial and error. I still am wasting a whole lot of time trying to fix things as do not know where and what to edit! Do you know of a good video tutorial site for editing vbulletin templates and mod templates? For example. I really need to fix the tabs in the header! I want to add a drop down and a new tab. I have been searching for over a week on how to do this correctly and I know if I had a clue it would take me about 5 minute to do. Is it possible to do stuff like this in dreamweaver? ( I am a clueless owner of CS4 webdesgn for mac) I acutally took the header template code and pasted into dreameaver but had no clue what to do next!

You will see there are some errors in my style as I did an upgrade to 3.8 and it messed it up. These are the things I really need a tutorial on so I can fix myself and not have to pay over $100 everytime I want a simple edit. I know there has to be some good tutorials on editing html templates and CSS for Vbulletin. I just do not know where to look. Thanks for the help

www.usafacommunity.com

[lisa]

Hi evrl,

I removed your reference to me in your post. When you do that, it often deters others from responding and they may have some advice too.

I personally have never done any major modifications with my template (as you can see) but any time I have a question, I go to vbulletin forums and those people there are extremely helpful. I can understand what you're going through, though. I was overwhelmed at first but just kept playing around until I figured things out.

But check those forums and ask questions there too. There are some people there who REALLY know their way around the software and have done some amazing things.

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/index.php

[evrl]

Thanks for the reply Lisa! I do not know if you have been on there lately but the creators of styles and mods are breaking away from vb.org and starting their own forum sties for support so they can charge for mods!! It has been very frustrating. I get cryptic answers as they want me to pay them over $100 for one line code edits. Vbulletin is no longer open source! so sad!

[lisa]

No, I don't go there much. I have installed a few of the vbulletin plugins from that site but they have all been free.