The folks over at Jelsoft recently launched a Blog add-on named vBulletin Blog (vBlog). Many community admins are taking this opportunity to add a blog to their forums. 

NuSEO.PHP version 1.6 first introduced support for vBlog. And now we are happy to announce a slew of new features added to NuSEO.PHP v1.7 RC1 which enable full configuration and customization of your vBlog site structure.

Take your blogs outside the forums

vBlog as most vBulletin add-ons reside inside vBulletin's installation directory. This means that if your forums are installed at http://www.domain.com/forums/, then the blog's default location is http://www.domain.com/forums/blog.php, even if using a third party rewrite tool, you usually end up with a URL like this: http://www.domain.com/forums/blog/.

NuSEO.PHP, being a site-wide SEO application, let's you design and customize your site's URL structure. For instance, here at NuHIT, the forums are located at http://www.nuhit.com/forums/, and the blogs are located at http://www.nuhit.com/blog/

Wildcard Domains: Add your members' usernames to their blog domain name

NuSEO.PHP version 1.7 adds full support for Wildcard Domains. Setting the Blog URL Format with NuSEO.PHP's Admin CP to "http://[user_name].nuhit.com/blog/" produces URLs such as this for your members blogs: elfmage.nuhit.com/blog/

This support extends to any other NuSEO.PHP module like vBulletin, phpFox, PhotoPost, etc. For instance, vBulletin members's profiles can be configured for URLs like this: elfmage.nuhit.com/profile/

(Notice that to enable this feature you have to configure your DNS with a wildcard DNS entry. We'll be posting instructions on how to do this soon.)

Social Bookmarking for vBlog

What good is a Web 2.0 Blog without Web 2.0 Social Bookmarks?

NuSEO.PHP let's you choose from over 20 different social bookmarking networks out of the box. You can see the icons at the top of each blog post.

In addition to the build-in social bookmarking networks, you can add custom networks if needed.

Optimizing vBlog Templates for SEO

JelSoft's team decided to add a left-hand column to vBlog's design. What seems like a rather small decision can have a large impact on SEO. In addition to vBulletin's header and navbar, now search engines have to skip all of the left hand column to find the page content.

We will be expanding on this issue and how to manually edit the templates in a later post.

High Performance has been one of the main cornerstones in the design and development of NuSEO.PHP since day one. It comes as no surprise that most of the changes and features added to NuSEO.PHP version 1.6 are intended to enhance performance and reduce server load. For instance, NuSEO.PHP now adds no extra queries to vBulletin's Forum Home.

New Features

• NuSEO.PHP Enterprise High Traffic Optimizer now supports XCache. (This is in addition to the previously supported Memcached, APC and eAccelerator).
  
• Added compatibility with popular phpFox plugins like the Arcade and Video add-ons.
  
• Built-in Unit Testing for higher reliability.
  
• Enabled integration with NuSEO.PHP Sitemap Generator.

Performance Improvements

• Improved performance of pages which contained links to multiple packages. For instance, PhotoPost Pro links in vBulletin pages, or vice-versa).
  
• NuSEO.PHP Enterprise now reads vBulletin's datastore from Memcache, XCache, APC or any other accelerator used by vBulletin. This saves a number of database queries, resulting in higher performance.
  
• Added integration with Project Tools datastore.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed issue that occurred when populating dynamic meta tags and the forum description contained HTML tags.
  
• Removed query to users table from Forum Home.
  
• Fixed vBulletin user cache sub-utilization, causing an avoidable query to the database in Forum Home.

Google's Webmaster Guidelines insist to "...Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would...." (Google's Webmaster Guidelines)
Given this "limitation" of Search Engine bots, it is very important to make it easy for them to determine what each of your site's pages is about.
One way to do this is to use H1 tags to enclose your page's title, or a sentence indicating what the page is about.
However, H1 tags are usually big, with lots of spacing, and take up a whole line. The trick is to add H1 tags without affecting your carefully designed web layout.

Following are instructions on how to add H1 tags to vBulletin's Navigational Bar (where vBulletin shows the breadcrumbs and the title of the current page, like forum and thread titles) without affecting how your site looks.
This is one of the many features implemented by NuSEO.PHP when optimizing vBulletin communities. If your site is running NuSEO.PHP, do not follow these steps, these changes are made automatically without the need to edit vBulletin's templates.

Steps:
1) Edit the headinclude template and at the end, add these lines:

<style>
.nuseo_hx { display: inline; color: inherit; border: none; font-size: 1em; font-color: inherit; font-weight: inherit; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; }
</style>

2) Edit the navbar template and find this code:

$navbits[lastelement]

and replace it for this:

<h1 class=nuseo_hx>$navbits[lastelement]</h1>

Save your changes and go to a forum or thread in your site. If everything worked as expected you should not see any change. Right click and go to 'View Source', search for the forum or thread title and it should be enclosed in H1 tags for all bots to see.

Notice that whenever you upgrade vBulletin and these templates are reverted, you need to reapply these changes.

Recently our customers requested a NuSEO.PHP Module for Project Tools (this is the first commercial add-on produced by Jelsoft for vBulletin). I started playing with Project Tools and I have to say that I am impressed with this software. So much so that we have decided to use it to power our support portal.

In the past we have tried Bugzilla, Mantis, SugarCRM (mostly a CRM, but we looked at their support functionality) and a couple of others. One way or another these packages failed to meet our needs.

Project Tools on the other hand was easy to setup, configure and deploy. And most importantly it integrates flawlessly with vBulletin, no template modifications, no "add a link here" or "insert that there". This was expected, coming from JelSoft, but still, I was pleasantly surprised.

We just launched Bug Trackers and Feature Requests tracker for NuSEO.PHP and NuWiki. If all goes well we will be extending the use of Project Tools to the rest of our product line, and we'll also be replacing our support ticket system.

NuWiki v1.3 RC1 is now available for download from the Premium Members Area.

New Features

• Implemented [readmore] BBCode, which tells NuWiki how much of an article to show in a NuWiki Auto-Link Preview.
  
• Added option to control whether NuWiki BBCodes are available in regular forums.
  
• Added "Dynamic Articles Enabled" option. If set, articles containing TEMPLATE, FORUMINDEX or BOOKINDEX BBCodes are not cached. This is done to allow for the dynamic content generated by these BBCodes. (This is Off by default).
  
• Added option to disable support for legacy wiki link and headline formats.
  
• Added options to control whether these BBCodes are enabled: FOOTNOTES, TABLE, DIV, SPAN.
  
• Added option to disable Tables of Content.
  
• Added option to add the link to top next to headlines.
  
• Added option to completely disable NuWiki's BBCode Parser.

Fixes

• Fixed: Added option to enhance compatibility with UTF-8
  
• Fixed: Styles in DIVs were not accepting relative sizes. E.g. width: 50%
  
• Fixed: Removed limit of 4 templates per article.
  
• Fixed: Added option to let NuWiki handle titles with special html characters, like &
  
• Fixed: Auto-Link Previews were not working if present in a non-NuWiki Forum.

A more detailed version history can be found in NuWiki's Changelog.