Showing latest posts from vBulletin on home page and RSS feeds

vBulletin is a fantastic forum script, however like every thing else, it’s not a complete solution in itself and requires a bit of tweaking to get it working the way you want it to work.

Today I am going to show you a small trick to display latest posts on home page and in RSS feeds, instead of only displaying latest posted topics, which vBulletin does out of the box. Displaying latest posts not only makes your forum look more active and it also helps members keep track of latest posts and in turn makes them more active in your forum.

Here is how you can display latest posts from your vBulletin forum.

1. Go to AdminCP.

2. Under Styles & Templates choose Style Manager.

3. Now you need to edit the style you use or one by one edit all the styles being used on your site.

4. From the template list choose to edit Headinclude template.

5. Find the following code

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”$vboptions[bbtitle] RSS Feed” href=”external.php?type=RSS2″ />

6. Add &lastpost=1 after external.php? i.e.

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”$vboptions[bbtitle] RSS Feed” href=”external.php?type=RSS2&lastpost=1″ />

7. That’s it 🙂

To edit Javascript syndication (to be displayed on static html pages), find the following line in the code

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”external.php?type=js”></script>

Add &lastpost=1 after external.php?type=js and you are all set, now RSS and Javascript feeds will display latest posts, which includes latest posted topics.