My site gets about 500K uniques a month and I understand your concern. One thing I did to help with congestion was to split my ad server (OpenAds) off onto its own server, and that helped tremendously. So... one server for vBulletin and one for OpenAds.

If you are on the same server, I'm not sure how it would benefit you to redirect people to the forum's main page if the server is overloaded, because the forum index page will be a load too, right? vBulletin has a setting in the config to let you specify a server load level after which users will be told that the server is busy, and to try later. So, any of the products that really sit on vBulletin should be able to use that. I can speak to vBadvanced because thats what I currently use. It is a plug-in to vBulletin, so it uses the same overload tool. I would expect vbPortal to use the same one. I haven't tried vbPortal in several years, but it was pretty "heavy" back then, so I wouldn't recommend it. I think it is also a dead project and hasn't been updated in a long time.

vbDrupal has configuration settings to help with overloading, although I've not tried them. They call it their "Throttle" tool. It lets you automatically scale some things down, and you can do it by user group... so that registered users don't get throttled the same as anonymous users... a nice feature.

I don't know about Joomla, but I would expect them to have similar capabilities.

If you expect a heavy load, you may want to put your CMS on a different server than vBulletin. I am not positive if this can easily be done with vbDrupal because it uses the same database. There are a couple of other vBulletin to Drupal hooks that do it differently and may work better with dual servers.

Better get some specs then mate as you are way off as I changed CMS to CMPS, and yes Vba is the only CMPs hence my statement. Now if your off topic reply wasnt enough, that certainly was enough to make me laugh :)

Im all for people learning from forums especially this forum, but im not for members who think they know it all and take one statement as offensive as the person was wrong and "they know better". Even if I didnt know CMS was or wasnt, I thought your reply was quite offensive to those who cant help the fact they are all not web coders like myself or you. People on my forum dont know what PHP code is or the difference from HTML etc, but I dont go about it in a negative way as if they "should know". That, that is not learning. My point is, there is a way about giving feedback like that.

So in the future, you may want to change your tone when writing as you never know who you are speaking to and what they do / know ;)

from http://vjoomla.com

Irony building.

The security flaw was found in the plugin, not joomla or vbulletin itself. They way they wrote the bridge opened up some nasty little holes that could potentially corrupt the site if exploited. I too am currently looking at a way to "bridge" my vbulletin and joomla. What I am trying to accomplish is a matching theme and also having user permissions across the site. So basically I either need joomla to pass the vb info over or have Joomla preload the vb session info. Matching up the theme will take some work in changing the navbar/header area to load the joomla header (trying to get away from the wrapper as it sometimes invokes scrollbars, bleh). That will be the trick. Once things are loaded up from vbulletin, I could potentially load up content based on eser/usergroup permissions.

My goal is to have a fluid site navigation much like this one Xbox Live Nation. Some of you may recognize who runs that site.

Anyone got any tips.? Currently running vbulletin 3.6.8PL2 and Joomla! 1.0.13 (considering leaping to the 1.5RC3 of Joomla!)

P.S. My site (which is a mess at the moment) is HERE.

Please post in one of the coding support questions. This is not something that can be answered in a Pre-Sales thread.

I have installed vbdrupal recently and is very, very impressed.
Drupal is the best and most flexible CMS out there and has won several prices recently for best CMS.

If you can think it, you can do it in Drupal.

Vbadvanced cmps is also great, but you cannot have several users posting content in vba cmps, editing each others content, giving other users right to edit own content, ect.

vBadvanced CMPS ^_*

vbadvanced is the way to go. Makes my site awesome :)

Just posting to mention, since this statement is incorrect, that vbPortal is not a dead project and is updated almost every time vBulletin release an update.

It would be a simple file edit to redirect to the forum when the load is too high, rather than display the usual splash screen that the server load is too high.

I use vBAdvanced, and the only real gripe with it is that every vBA site, mine included, looks pretty much the same (with a couple of exceptions of course, like this site).

It the freakin' tables that kill me. Tables, tables, tables, blocks, blocks, blocks. Big center blocks, small side blocks, same nav, same options, etc, etc. I've redesigned my portal a dozen times and it still looks just like every other vBA site out there, and it's far and away my least favorite part of my site. One of these days I'll break down and just hand code a proper one, but for ease of use my vote goes to vBA as well - even if it's overused and generic now.

My .2c of course, fwiw.

That site even looks like every other vbadvanced site.

the only difference is the huge flash banner that took 45 seconds to load and almost crashed firefox.

Yeah, I'll eat my hat. Pass the salt.

That was last May. Since then I sat down and wrote an entirely new framework from the ground up that is capacle of running itself without interfering with vbulletin in any way. It's taken 9 months and as much of that development was funded by my current employer I still need his permission to release any of the code which may never happen. However my own vbulletin website is being converted over to it at long last and things are going smoothly.

The framework is called Pam here in the office - that stands for PHP Ajax Multimedia framework. Pam is very flexible and powerful - but difficult for a non-programmer to use. That's sort of the point though - each and every one of these frameworks is built with an eye on making getting the site up and running as quickly as possible. None of them are easy to build modules are components for. Pam is different in that rather than make things easy on the end user Pam makes things easy on the programmer (who is in turn expected to make life easy for the end user - that's his job).

Building a module for Pam is easy - drop it in. Pam can even run vbulletin in its entirely as a module. How much (or little) a program is integrated into the framework is the programmer's choice. No other PHP framework online can make the claim that vbulletin, Joomla, vbulletin, and phpmyadmin will run underneath it. Pam can.

But this thing is not ready and will not be ready from prime-time for awhile yet. My pride was greatly burned by the whole vJoomla fiasco. I won't release anything I'm not confident in yet. While I'm confident Pam can run a site with me administrating it and fixing it, I still have to go into the core libraries on occasion and fix things. Until that stops happening any deployment won't occur.

vizdepot.com although running vB 3.0.x still is a really good example IMHO what can be done. I don't think first look, you wouldn't know it was running vbPortal.

I am using vBDrupal: www.midgard.forum.de

If you want to look at the forum and see how the Drupal blocks are included, chose the style Admins Spielwiese when you enter the forum.

I switched over from vBPortal to Drupal because I needed a CMS which can manage content and not only posts. Something only a real CMS can provide. vBAdvance was not a soloution for me.

I also needed a powerful search engine. The Drupal taxomony module is the thing I really need. The main issue with other CMS i know is, that you can easily add content there, but how will you manage the search for it?

Best regards
Hans-Joachim

Hans are you sure that is the correct url you gave, please?

vbPortal does not use threads and posts for articles, it has its own tables and permissions. Users can post articles and reply. There is an advanced (powerful) search that will search all articles - just like the advanced forum search and it allows you to select criteria and order your results. There is also an advanced search for the journal blogger and for the bug tracker module. There have been many updates, which was the point to my first post. I'm not arguing for or against anything, I just wanted to correct the other persons post that completely misinformed anyone reading it that vbPortal was a 'Dead' project. vbPortal is not a dead project, there have been thirty six upgrades since vBulletin 3.0.0 was released three years ago.

I agree about vba/vbportal and the like being just portals. I wouldnt class them as a CMS as many have said in this thread already. A proper CMS allows your users to make content like by submitting articles, upload files, make blogs etc.

My experience/opinions:

Joomla - A proper CMS but is 100% mind boggling to use. For me anyway. I just dont get it. The framework used or whatever its called is just weird. Mambots blah blah blah. Very strange imo lol. Maybe I didnt spend enough time trying to use it : s

Mambo - Same as above, obviously.

Anyway, I run a community for djs, producers and music lovers. Not a big community mind but still gets a lot of traffic and ranks well. Suppose its more of a place for info. but id like to change that by offering my members to upload dj mixes and was looking for a CMS that could allow this so I didnt go for vba/vbportal or similar because I needed a proper CMS where users could submit articles, upload music and which would skin my vbulletin forum so they both match. I tried loads of CMS/Portals from opensource as well as from other places but they just didnt offer what I wanted.

I then tried a lot commercial CMS with one being Jamroom, keep in mind I already have vbulletin/vbseo so MUST have forum integration of some kind that like shares usergroups or something heh. Unfortunately, Jamroom was a bit tricky to work with to and I couldnt get the forum integration to work properly.

In the end I put in for Subdreamer CMS Pro even though I knew many say bad things about SD I thought well the hell ill risk $99

At first I found it a complete nightmare trying to position the plugins : s after a while I sussed that. Then I found out of about 200 subdreamer skins available only one of them passed as valid xhtml but the design/template was way too tricky to edit due to the amount of images used etc. Im not very good with the design side of things so left that skin. In the end I found one that had the right layout and was set as strict xhtml which was wrong as it should have been xhtml 1.0 which is a good compromise. I changed it to xhtml 1.0 and fixed the remaining warnings/errors using the w3c checker and customised the design/layout etc and finished the main skin and forumskin and after just skinned the vbulletin forum using Subdreamer and everything work a charm : D

I still haven't managed to setup a proper member uploading/downloading system yet, hopefully ill be able to use the download manager plugin once theyve improved it and just change the code a little. But apart from that am pretty much happy with Subdreamer now. Since I joined theyve constantly been releasing new skins that seo friendly, good design and the support is excellent. Subdreamer CMS is very sef too. Nice neat urls that with vbulletin and vbseo works a treat. No point having a site if it doesnt rank well right.

So…if your after a site that is similar to mine then I recommend you try Subdreamer CMS Pro.

Im still looking into other cms/scripts though to see what extra I can add to my site. Will have to try vbportal/vbdrupal etc on localhost and have a play.

DJ Passion - Dance Music Community - Home

Hope my info helps some out.

Chris.

Chris, you should consider taking a look at Elgg

this may work for what you trying to achieve

:up:

See my post above yours, that is exactly what vbPortal supports - users can post articles, news, reviews, classified ads, upload files and create a blog.

quote

A content management system (CMS) supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of corporate information.

It covers the complete lifecycle of the pages on your site, from providing simple tools to create the content, through to publishing, and finally to archiving.

It also provides the ability to manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published pages, and the navigation provided to the users.

quote

The idea of a portal is to collect information from different sources and create a single point of access to information - a library of categorized and personalized content. It is very much the idea of a personalized filter into the web.

I agree that vbA is not a CMS but that it is a portal.

Scotsmist .... !!!!!! hey dude, they let you out of the code cave I see. :p
Do you have your Super "D" long underwear and utility belt ? :D

see ya on phpportals

sounds interesting. care to link me to vbportal?

Clayton: the Elgg.org site was down. But I checked out the classic.elgg.org site and had a quick look and must say it doesnt look to bad but atm there isnt a vBulletin integration plugin/mod/hack. The networking side of things looks great though! So I will definitely check that site out when Elgg.org 1.0 is released - I subscribed. Thanks for the link, Clayton.

What id like to do with my site now is offer my members mini sites off of my site. Just like to be able to give them a few good pages to use for promotional reasons. The vBulletin profiles are too basic. This is a good example of what im after http://www.musicv2.com/artist/djbigboy

I check the source code but no generator metatag so stumped as to how they set that up. Guess it must be a custom job. But yup, id like to offer something like or similar to the above example like offer dj hosting, music profiles etc.

I just checked out vBdrupal for the first time and daaam is it good. I wonder if I can use it with subdreamer/vbulletin+vbseo somehow. Still looking into it :D

scotsmist: tbh I havent looked into vBportal to much but at a first glance when checking the site I just assumed it were like vba. My bad. If it does what you say it does though then awesome!! :D I guess vBportal is half CMS and half Portal then aye :rolleyes:

Anyway, im going look into vBdrupal more. Wouldnt mind looking into VBportal more but im skint so would be just a waste of time heh.

Cheers for the info guys :cool:

Chris.

phpportals.com (vbportal.com) was started in February 2001, so members see it the other way round, that vbA looks like vbPortal :D

Hi Zak I have holes in my tights and a few pounds around the utility belt. It happens when 40 knocks on the door.

there actually is a rough hack for vB however it makes Elgg the controller which to me defeats the purpose, due to my interest in the development of a few projects music and sound related etc I was looking into Elgg, I am sure with a bit of cajouling we can whittle out a vb integration hack sometime.

I also utilise vbdrupal and if anything has power it is Drupal, this will certainly be the platform of the future, when Drupal 7 arrives it will be massive.

Good luck with your project

:up:

Still looking for a good CMS system such as the one www.notebookreview.com uses. It will be for a Tech News, Reviews and forum site.

45 seconds? unlikely unless the server was under load or a router was down.



I like the look of the vbavanced portal, it may be over used though I agree.

_V

I'll reserve judgement on Elgg.org's release of v1.0. Which is summer, so when that happens, I'll test it on my live news site.

Until then, I'm staying with my VBAdvanced installations on three different game console websites.

I'm using a custom vbadvance: www.neozeta.com
And, well, if you want something, you can make it.
The code its simple enough to be capable of make some changes without redo everything.
But its a forum making CMS, not a real CMS. And you need to know it. To really know it.
You cant expect to be anything else....without make some big changes in the code.
I like it because for me is more complicated to integrate with the vb, than recode the presentation.