Creating the Forumhome page in vbulletin

@woofytalk raised the core question (serve a non-forum landing page at the site root while leaving vBulletin in a subfolder). @Tribolis and @Dani noted the site uses custom front-end work, and @PlatinumBullet referenced built-in config options. Below are practical, server-side patterns and a short checklist that expand on implementation choices and common pitfalls not covered above.

One safe choice is to serve the site root from a separate document root and alias the forum folder. That keeps the forum code untouched and makes the front page fully independent.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot /var/www/site_root
    Alias /forums /var/www/forums
</VirtualHost>

If you cannot change vhost config, an .htaccess-level approach can either internally rewrite root requests to a landing script (URL stays "/") or issue a 301 redirect (URL changes). Use the internal rewrite for a true root landing; use a 301 if you want search engines to index the forum path.

# internal rewrite (serve home.php for "/")
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ /home.php [L]

# or permanent redirect (choose one)
RedirectMatch 301 ^/$ /forums/

For Nginx setups, either use try_files to serve a root script or proxy to an app backend. Example:

location = / { try_files /home.php =404; }
location /forums/ { alias /var/www/forums/; }

Quick checklist and cautions:

• Set cookies to use path "/" so forum sessions work across root and subfolder.
• Update the forum's base URL setting so generated links point where you expect.
• Fix hardcoded asset paths (CSS/JS/images) or use symlinks to preserve paths.
• Use 301 redirects for SEO-preserving moves and add canonical tags if content can appear in two places.
• Test on a staging host and back up configs and vBulletin files before changes.

These options let the root serve a custom front-end while keeping vBulletin functional in /forums.