Bye everybody,

Through 2001 I’ve tried various forum software to get my community off the ground, but was not content with what was out there. vBulletin 2.x was announced and on the radar. At the end of the year (literally 31st December) I was able to place an order and convert my site through the night. January 1st it was online and we received great response. It was soon clear that I was a fan, and I became an active daily poster.

Yes, it’s a fact, today my access has been removed from the community forums and company sites. So I can now also blog and tweet about it. February 2004 – February 2009; version 3.x of vBulletin. I’ve been blessed to have a great hobby as being part of the support team helping those with questions.

I’ve mentioned it before in another post, but now that I’ve confirmed it works for twitter I’d like to point out that if you’re on a public network, or you’re using someone’s wifi, or you’re simply security concious that you might wish to consider using https:// so the traffic between twitter and you is encrypted.

https://twitter.com/ works. So use it!

With MySQL v3 out of the way, and MySQL 4 and 5 being used everywhere now (and if you have not upgraded to the latest stable .. shame on you) I think it is time to point out that you can use MySQLi for your code, software and sites. This blog is to inform you about MySQLi and give you information so you can decide to upgrade and if you have already to perhaps use it on your vBulletin installation.

Bigger PHP applications, such as vBulletin can gain a lot of increased performance from running a PHP op-code cache/accelerator such as APC.

Here are some instructions on how install APC on various systems, my personal experience is with what appears the most common: 32bit CentOS 5 Server.