Troubleshooting

If you have managed to get this far without problems, then that's great. Chances are that you won't have any problems at all because vBulletin has been designed to make installation quick and easy.

However, it would be unwise to discount the possibility that things could go wrong.

Here are some of the most commonly occurring problems that you might encounter during the installation of vBulletin

Database Access Issues

This is the commonest issue that you are likely to encounter and isn't really a vBulletin problem—it just means that you haven't made all the necessary configuration changes.

If vBulletin cannot access the database, check the following:

• You are using the correct database username. (Remember that a prefix may have been added automatically.)
• The password is correct.
• The database name is correct. (Again, a prefix may have been added automatically to the database name.)
• You have granted the database user full privileges for the database.

If problems still persist, then the problem may be that your FTP client didn't upload the files properly (especially the text files, which are uploaded as ASCII). Upload all the files again and try to run the installation script again.

Images/Styling Not Showing

This is another common problem, and it can make the site look very odd—no graphics will show, and the text will be unformatted.

The problem here is that your web server is sensitive to capitalization but your FTP program uploaded the files all lowercase.

To solve this problem navigate to the cpstyles folder and rename the following folders:

 vbulletin_3_default -> vBulletin_3_Default vbulletin_3_frontend -> vBulletin_3_Frontend vbulletin_3_manual -> vBulletin_3_Manual vbulletin_3_silver -> vBulletin_3_Silver vbulletin_2_default -> vBulletin_2_Default

PHP Errors

The most common reason for a PHP error is having white space at the end of a PHP file after the closing ?> tag. Check for this in any of the files that you have recently edited and remove it. Then resave the file, upload it and try again.

If the problems continue, then upload all the files again and try to run the installation script once more.