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Internet forums are known as one of the symbols of web 1.0, but in the last year they were evolving in a more web 2.0 manner, saving their natural inclination for socializing, knowledge and ideas sharing.

To completely fullfill the new requirements of the current web world, Internet forums need a rethinking of the user interaction, user interfaces and functionalities.

<a href=”http://http://www.vbulletin.com” title=”Official web site” target=”_blank”>vBulletin</a> with its latest release (3.7) is the mother of all new web 2.0 forums!

Now we explore the new functionalities added with the current version that makes vBulletin one of the reference software in the forum world.

They made a lot of improvements related to social networking environment to create more attractive and dynamic communities; in particular the personal profile page has been completely redrawn to resemble Facebook or MySpace.

The screenshot shows you a lot of new boxes as public messages (everybody can read them viewing the profile page), buddy list and the photogallery.
The starting point of the “social” way is the creation of users groups and the profiles and photogallery sharing. The management of groups is very simple and effective as the other administrative operations in VBulletin.

You can manage unlimited groups, send messages only to a specific group creating several communities in the same space.

vBulletin introduces improvements not only in the social network area but also in other tipical web 2.0 zones as the post tagging allowing users to give a better context of their contributes and giving a new search opportunity with the omnipresent tag cloud.

The user interaction has been optimized using AJAX tecniques based on YUI framework for the DOM manipulation and other low level functions, making vBulletin very friendly to use and very productive. A tipical example is inline editing as shown in the image below:

Lightbox is the preferred way to show post attachments and photogallery, a de facto standard, that gives vBulletin a nice and modern touch.

Using reCAPTCHA they put a lot of attention on blind users that can submit the form thanks to audio version of the images used to prevent spam.

A lot of interesting content is buried in the forum posts so is very important to let this knowledge emerge and vBulletin solves this problem using the social bookmarkinh links to add the relevant information on Digg, del.icio.us and so on.

<a href=”http://www.vbulletin.com/”>vBulletin</a> official site is using this version since December 2007 so it is production ready and if you are interested in building your own forum, the price is very cheap. Currently about $150.

Software requirements are limited to PHP and MySQL hosting, a very common setup so it’s not so difficult to start your new forum!