Or perhaps we don't see eye to eye on what a "message board / forum" should be?

You seem to like the billions of pointless features that are thrown into vB. I like a forum that is clean and to the point. Categories, discussions, and nothing more.

Then there is no point to discuss. Get simpleboard or something very simplistic. There are a lot that will work with Joomla. Or go to to hotscripts.com

I've already found my alternative, and I'm not using Joomla or simpleboard.. but that isn't what this thread was about. I'm not looking for an alternative, I posted an alternative for the original poster to check out that works with his Joomla install.

i was thinking of using joomla but u lot have put me off it cause of the integration problem with vb and then someone saying it causes server load.

You can use them in concert, but I wouldn't try to integrate them. Joomla is a great CMS, so you really shouldn't need all your forum members to have Joomla accounts, right?

I originally set up vbulletin in Joomla 1.5 but my old version has so many components/plugin/modules that are not forward compatible, that I reverted back to 1.0.15. Even so, the product/plugin I wrote for vbulletin (3.6.8) does work for both for look/feel only.

I'm still investigating a login bridge, however, I may simply require my users to do an additional login when they want to download files (I'm using docman, which has far more functionality than download II). Also, though I do receive quite a few visitors, very few tend to actually post. That, and all of my forums are presently publicly viewable. So I may end up skipping the login bridge until something stable comes along. That, or... if I have time, write one myself.

In any event, you can see my joomla!vb integration here. Just click on forum in the menu bar. And, if you're interested in doing something similar, feel free to pm me. Or not. :shrugs:

I believe they are complimentary. Joomla can handle a more reasonable article structure, focusing in an article and its readers. Vbulletin, on the other hand, focuses in the discussion itself. I've been joomla+VB with bbpixel's integration for almost one year and I'm fully satisfied in a 55K members environment. I have a lot of visitors to both areas, joomla's frontend, and VB forum backend. They both have their strenghts and this way I can draw traffic from both.

Go to big-boards, see how many fireboards are there.

You've got a point in there, but see, there is a template system, you don't need to modify the core to get tableless.



Nice one. Anyway, I believe that using BBpixel's login integration, plus a little css effort, you could end up with a fairly decent integration.

But dude..

If that's what determines somebodies decision to go with vB over an alternative, that's just ridiculous. The percentage chance that your board is ever going to be big enough to be considered for "big boards" are so slim to none now-a-days.

Forums are no where near as popular as they were five years ago and that number is only going to get lower. The web is young and new things get brought to it every single day. Statistically, forums are becoming old news.

Also, I wouldn't say that it's fair to say Fireboards is out of the question because there are none on that site since Fireboards is new, where as vB and PHPBB are almost as old as the internet itself (joking).

But either way, I was simple stating that as far as integration goes, Fireboards would make more sense to use over vBulletin with Joomla. I wasn't stating an alternative to vBulletin itself.

Thanks. I've been following the BBpixel discussions (along with other login integration product discussions such as jfusion?which won't work for me since I'm still using joomla 1.0.15). In fact, I ran into similar problems (i.e., cannot log into admin) with jfusion and my sandboxed joomla 1.5 installation. Though, iirc, jfusion is still in beta. In any event, afaics, the various available solns are still far too unstable to use.

yeah credit to the current jfusion author for resurrecting the project, but he's still working on the main part I see.