I know this one might be a bit of a long shot, but would there be some way to set things up so that each category on the CMS could itself go on a separate subdomain, so we could do things like splitting up news and content sections?

@mukashi: Not with the current version; i've not really touched upon how to customise cms urls as they are handled differently from forum urls. It's something i'll probably look at in the future however.

I've been playing around with whats possible. Currently i've managed to flip the id and the title around sucessfully. As well as including the forum name in the url for threads. I'm hoping to bring quite a bit of customisation in the future for forum urls.

Added a file to the zip which gets uploaded to the admincp. This file does a best guess generation of rewrite rules for you.

trying to get working with subdomain.domain.com

but i have a problem with this step:
5. You can now set a value for forums to be http://forums.domain.com and blogs to be http://blogs.domain.com or similar based upon your requirement.

setting it (site name/url/contact details) changes whole vbulletins default domain. help? i want to open home with domain.com and forums with subdomain

not if you modify the db query that gets the thread data :D
I know it's a lot of work and there are other ways to do it as well, maybe by checking all the cached templates and rewriting all matched urls is easier, in any case i'll defiantly do this or might give up n go with vbseo even tho its a rip off (IMO)

You need to change the setting in the friendly url settings. If you change the setting for threads to http://forums.domain.com/threads and the forums friendly url to http://forums.domain.com/index.php it should work.

The problem isn't that the data isn't avalaible anywhere, its that its not avaliable within the part of the code that forms the url. I've been experimenting, I've managed to save and retrieve the data in most important places (eg forum display, forum home, thread display etc) but not everywhere. It needs a bit more work yet still leaves some dead urls around the place... (vb's fault for not using {vb:link ...} everywhere a link is made)

vbSeo does a few thigns this can't, but most people jsut want customisable urls, so for them it is a rip off. Rewriting templates or output is one way to do it but its ugly, bug prone and inefficient.

You are marked on here as a coder, so I assume this means you've release at least one mod implying that you understand php. I'll upload the code i've been working on for threads and you can give it a go, be aware though, you will need to create your own rewrite rules and edit the code to change the url structure.

it's possible to replace forums ids with names?
for example:
domain.com/forums/10
to: domain.com/forums/off-topic

hmm looks nice /threads/forum/topic

can we rewrite it as /forum-f<id>/topic-t<id>.html ? or /forum/<id>-topic

I've only released some javascript based mod but actually I only code in PHP
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and the code, I haven't started on working on URL rewrites and SEO yet but I will soon

VB should have used one single router and one single method to create links, but what's been released is a mess. I call vbSEO rip off when comparing it with other community softwares out there which provide very good SEO tools for free and the cost for vbSEO is almost the same as what you would pay to buy those softwares, otherwise I'm not questioning it's functionalities

That one isn't easilly possible, the id needs to be avaliable somewhere for vb to use to query the db with.

If you are confidant with php, you can take a look at the contents of the experimental zip files I uploaded; otherwise you will have to wait until that code is stable and included in the product.

I suspect that this will be the case once the rewrite is completed eg by 4.2/4.3 but for 4.0.x we have to cope with the mess thats been made.

I agree with this fully, especially when you consider it used to cost $150 even when vbulleitn was only $160 to buy. If it were $50 I immagine it'd be installed on pretty much every vbulletin board (except the official ones of cause :p)

I almost wonder if IB have got some deal with vbSEO not to kill them off; it took so long to get friendly urls in the core package and even with them in there, the functionallity is so lacking. While developing this i've been constantly amased at how easy it was to get most functionlity working. To get it working perfectly requires a few file edits, but vb could have made them.

I intend to keep making improvments to this product including the amount of customisation avaliable and hopefully expanding to other areas eg the CMS untill vb improve the friendly urls in the core product.