PhotoPost takes over vba Gallery
 

What's your opinion about it?
Have a look: http://www.vbadvanced.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12926

Really BAD news IMHO.
vBAdvanced Gallery was a good product ...

that's what I said to Andreas, now Photopost's support is gonna be even worse now that they are back to being the only gallery provider for vbulletin that integrates well, hopefully this new addition to their company make some good changes, but I highly doubt it.

hmm, so now there is no 60$ options ? just the 130$ photopost ?
glad Harald_T made the gallery hack for vb :D conisdering its free ;)

Yeah, I'm a bit disturbed about this myself. I was a HUGE vBadvanced Gallery supporter.

Luckily I'm fairly happy with the current product and should be able to stick with it until Jelsoft comes up with something.

There's no way I'm using anything from PhotoPost.

Ahh well, every cloud has a silver lining and all that..

Now I have a reason to drag my 2 PP licenses out of the old toolbox and use them somewhere...

I wonder if my vBAG license will change at all...I can't seem to find it in the download package.

The WHOLE reason I bought vBa Gallery was to get away from PhotoPost. Now they're going to take the code and screw it up like they do all of their other software, their support sucks, and all their software is, is their other software with language file changes. The only reason PhotoPost is around is because they orginally stole the code from vBulletin.

And, they only bought vBa Gallery for the code, nothing more. They aren't going to sell it, they're just going use the code in Photopost and all of their other software, which is essentially all the same, just different language files.

I'm willing to bet Photopost 6.0 will be a complete "rewrite" using the vBa Gallery code.

I still have a PhotoPost license that I wish I could ditch.

Since PP hasn't announced anything on their site yet it's too early to criticize them.

Here's some additional information from Brian: http://www.vbadvanced.com/forum/show...8&postcount=14

It's definately not too early to criticize them for those of us that have dealt with them in the past.

I doubt, that they will develop the product in the future in such a good way, as it Brian did it.

I used PP before, and switched to vBa. And now...

I can understand Brian, at least it is business. And if it was a good deal, why Brian should not have sold it. But why they pay a lot of money for this code ? Probably not, because they like Brian so much.. I doubt, that the price for vBa will be the same in the futre...

So, probably it is time in future, to have a closer look on good hacks.

Jörg

x2

I will never buy from reviewpost again due to the poor support. They've messed over a lot of people (including myself) forcing them to turn to vbadvanced for quality products and quality support.

edit:

anybody else notice the price increase??

Photopost PHP used to be on sale for $99.. now: $129
Reviewpost PHP used to be on sale for $70.. now :$99
Photopost Classifieds used to be on sale for $70.. now $99

This is the stupidest thing I've ever sene someone post about PhotoPost; did you know the first few versions of PhotoPost were written in PERL? Yep. A Perl product that was integrated with vBulletin, a PHP product, from the start

:rolleyes: .

Lots of mean-spirited trash talk in here and speculation.

First, everything you love about vbAdvanced Gallery will be preserved. At this point, the name is changing to PhotoPost vBGallery and that's it. Our company will be adding support people with vbAdvanced Gallery-specific knowledge to ensure that quality support can be provided.

To address some specific quotes above:

This is wholly false. I personally wrote PhotoPost PHP Pro in Perl in 2001. It was later converted to PHP a few years later. No part of PhotoPost PHP Pro came from vBulletin.

We have not yet set pricing for PhotoPost vbGallery. However, I don't understand why it's reasonable to pay $160 for a quality forum (vBulletin), but it isn't reasonable to pay $129 for a quality gallery application. As for our past prices, we have offered limited-time sales, but our regular price has averaged $129-$149 for several years.

This is false. vbAdvanced Gallery, now PhotoPost vbGallery, will be sold as its own, unique product. New features will be added going forward, and updates will be made to correct any bugs etc. It will be developed as its own product, just as PhotoPost PHP Pro will continue to be developed as its own product. They serve different markets. PhotoPost PHP Pro is jam-packed with features, and works by itself or with a variety of forums. PhotoPost vbGallery is streamlined, containing only essential features, and integrates very well with vBulletin but can't work by itself or with other forums.

The price I paid for vBulletin is relatively small compare to the great support they provide. Quality and price of a product is one thing, great customer service is another. Plus, a forum software is more popular as a stand-alone product, where a gallery software can run by itself but often is part of a forum as a "bonus" for members. So you can't compare the two. I'm also paying more than a lot of people for web hosting, but that's the price I'm willing to pay for quality service and great customer support.

Sorry, but please don't compare PhotoPost with vB. I used PP before, and the code is light-years behind the vB-Code. And there is much more functionality in vB than in PP.

But anyway... I am curious what you are going to do out of vBa. Maybe your work will convince me, so I will pay maintenance-fee to you.

J?rg

fact remain, support is as poor as ever. I guess what all the members who own vBa gallery & Photopost product license wanna see is a better support.

I'm not familiar with photopost software or it's support staff but it's not very encouraging that nobody has anything good to say about this.

Saying that our support is poor isn't very constructive. If you can provide specific examples as to how we can improve, based on your own personal experiences, your recommendations will be used to improve our policies and to help us make decisions on quantity and type of support personnel to employ. For instance, what, exactly, makes you think our support is poor? Have you experienced delays getting support? Have our answers to your support questions been inaccurate or not helpful? etc.

Something like "support" is not fixed and rigid for years. It changes dynamically as support people come and go, and as demand/volume for support increases and decreases over time. While we may have had some growing pains in years past, the quality of our support over the past year or more has been quite good and we have received quite a lot of positive feedback.

Maybe there should be a rating system included with all your support emails and on your forum.

I would also challenge those individuals who had a negative experience 2, 3, 4 years ago, to not hold a perpetual grudge and to give us a chance to exceed your expectations. Our company has grown and evolved over the past several years. Our product has matured, as have our support capabilities. There are only a very small minority of customers that have experienced problems with our support in the past (for a variety of reasons: some our fault, some not) - the vast majority, 99 out of 100, have been wholly satisfied. Unfortunately, once a person has had one bad experience, they keep coming back to tell the world.

In any case, know that we are always working to provide the best support possible, and with this transition to include PhotoPost vBGallery in our sales-mix, we will be working like crazy to exceed your expectations for support.

So does that reply mean that you don't have any specific problems or recommendations regarding our support?

Regarding ratings, with every purchase we send out a request for customers to submit an evaluation. That's where the "99/100" numbers came from in my post above. If anyone has a problem with our support, we're not going to just leave you hanging - if you need to, you can contact me directly and any issues will be promptly resolved to your complete satisfaction.

Well support is one thing, but to those who are interested to know, Photopost's gallery system is really good, at least that's my opinion cause I have been using it for a while myself. The code works well if installed right. The only thing that I didn't like when I got photopost was it's template system, but it is slowly changing with their new versions and I'm kinda getting used to it by now.

I have always had my support questions answered in a day or less on PP.
It's not as fast as vB.com but they get answered.
I have no experience with vBa Gallery but do use vB CMPS.

Looks like this got off on the wrong foot. Where can users gets support at this moment? How about downloading the product that was paid for? Can you support a product that you are not familiar with yet?

I'm just hoping that there are no changes made to my current VBA licence ... Like the branding free option I purchased.

For now, vbAdvanced Gallery customers can obtain support via this page:
http://www.photopost.com/ppost_contact.pl

Regarding downloading, we have not yet received a customer list from the vBAdvanced Gallery creators. Therefore if we can't confirm customers, we can't deliver software. We expect to receive the list on Monday or Tuesday. We also expect to receive all support threads and posts from vBAdvanced Gallery Mon/Tues and we will import these into our forums. All vBAdvanced Gallery customers will receive a login to access the PhotoPost members area to be able to download the product and post to our support forums.

We are familiar with the product and will become more so over time. We will also be hiring support people who have a great deal of experience modifying and working with vBAdvanced Gallery.

If you already purchased branding free, then you'll continue to have that option. If any changes are to be made to the agreement, we will let you know but we will of course try to be as fair and reasonable as possible.

Looks like we have the first Paid Product advertised on vBulletin.org.

Must be nice to have such privledges. :/

For me, the whole transaction is not looking very professional, from one day to another, nobody's knowing nothing.
Michael P PP developer wrote:We all who own the gallery can only hope the postman is not loosing the CD and Michael will it be possible to integrat it into your systems. :rolleyes:

That was a RECOMMENDATION. ;)

its a damn monopoly photopost grabs vbadvanced takes out the lower cost software. and raises there prices so they now force anyone who wants a good gallery to pay more :( Horrible before vbadvanced went down i was looking at both integrations and i really did like photopost and vbadvanced was a nice product as well. then vbadvanced goes down. and no more 59 dollar option. the 99 dollar photopost gallery jacks up 30 bucks more. and now completely throws me off of photopost. that software in no way is worth 130 dollars. you can get stand alone gallery like coppermine or myegallery for postnuke for free. and they got the same type of **** going on batch uploads permissions systems ratings all that jazz.

its cool to ask for cash for your software when its well supported and offers alot to the web but its a gallery 60 bucks should be standard pricing for it at most. and you would make more sales. 130 for a gallery is crazy 100 bucks alone was on the steep side as well.. difference between photopost (130) and vbulletin ( 150) Vbulletin has a huge community working to improve and always add to there existing product. tons of featutres your not gonna get with a photogallery... photopost has a picture gallery and a few features you can get with free galleries.. i dont know what to think but the rasing of the price made me not like this company one bit

i own 3 vba galleries and 2 photopost galleries...
i've been through the mill with them both...
i don't care who owns it or how much it costs...
i'm mostly interested in getting one good gallery that works problem free, in any environment, with HIGH volume traffic and good tech support...
this was not accomplished amongst the 2 companies individually..
it will be interesting to see if scott can go balls to the walls on this project and make one, or both of them, shine.
:alien:

My jaw dropped when I saw the title.
My b*lls fell off when I saw what Brian posted.
Sad day.

I think I know what my next modification must be .... anyone wants to chip in, contact me privately.

Although you don't get near the level of integration with vBulletin that either PhotoPost or vBGallery offers.

Well, I used PP for sometime and it is pretty solid for a gallery. I switched to VBa because of the connection on my site to VB, it was better than PP. If they plan to keep it then I say fine.

The problem with all of this was that Brian told ABSOLUTELY NO ONE. I thought his site was down for a few days and bam!

Scott/MP: Get ahold of the Gallery owners list and send them an email and post a single thread on teh PP forums for folks to go to. I think once people can get pointed in a direction then the better.

Others, PP is rather solid and no $129 is not much for a gallery. There some others out there that are over $1000 for a professional system.

Scott et al. I would also ask that you expand the area on the PP Forums to include a hacks section for VBa. One of the great things over PP was that VBa always had a ton of addons and hacks and could easily get mods when you needed them. With ppdev offline for good you should add this aswell. It was always a pain to get mods for PP/VB before.

I say we wait and see,

-Jason

cing I'd be glad to buy a gallery script from you, if it was a similar quality to vbadvanced. So I wish you good luck if you decide to make one.

I've had bad experience with PP, so I hope this isnt the downfall for vbgallery, also the new price is a complete joke. I will use any good free galley software which works with vb or any alternative paid one which might appear because of this.

the reason no one was told was probably, so no one could take advantage of the low price, If I had known I would have bought a few licenses for future use but with caution.

Bud you need to finish the articles hack and get that dang glossary back up!!

I started to open a new set of forums, but with the pending importing of the threads/posts from the "old" support system, it seemed best to hold off until we got that data from Brian (which I understand is on the way) to avoid duplication. We are working to get this in place as soon as possible.

And we recently added a Mods section for PhotoPost and I will be sure to import the one used for vBGallery as well.

How will the new members area for support work on photopost? any plans to make it support multiple scripts/licences/branding options?

The one thing I like about brian's site is the product/support/licence system he uses, it makes it very easy to track what is bought, and or get updates or downloads etc for various versions of the script.

as for price, it should stay the same as vbagallery was, I was about to buy a branding package for it and full licence of the gallery for a client this weekend, I had to work hard to get them to accept the price ..

I'm not sure yet how the forums will be intergated or weather they will require their own forum; I have to see what we get and how easily it will import/merge.

I don't have any information on the license manager, but it is something that we've wanted to do for a long time (mutliple license manager). The "problem" is our cart system which takes credit card offers (not limited to PayPal) and it's ability to manage customers.

This should have been done before the plug was pulled a vbadvanced.