Why so little attention towards CMS integration?
 

When I look at open source content management systems, many offer integration with phpBB and SMF, but vBulletin and Invision Power Board integration is almost nonexistent. Message boards on CMS portal sites are often filled with requests for vBulletin integration, with responses usually falling into three categories - "me too". "if you want it so bad, go code it yourself" and "out of principle, I won't code it, even though I could, because it's not open source"".

A common theme in many posts here and at vbulletin.com is content management system integration. There seems to be a huge demand for vBulletin/CMS integration, but there are so few projects out there; the excellent Drupal integration effort, a bridge for Joomla (which doesn't offer true integration), and that's about it.

"Check out vBportal/vBindex/vBadvanced." While I respect the effort that went into vBindex and vBadvanced, they aren't true content management systems. They serve mainly as portals or entrance pages to a forum-dominated site.

"Buy Subdreamer/Storyteller/Miraserver/Virtuanews/vgPortal/PhpCow/NePHP." Again, they're probably all good programs, but they have a limited userbase compared to the open source content management systems. Some of those programs are one-man projects, development is slow or stalled, and their future is uncertain. Except for vBulletin integration, they usually don't have the feature set or extensibility of most open source content management systems.

[nasal_voice]"Well, go code it yourself!"[/nasal_voice] The typical response from the Slashdot/ponytail-and-neckbeard types. Unfortunately, most of us aren't expert PHP programmers. The majority of us probably can't program, period. If we were, we probably would have coded our own message boards instead of paying for vBulletin.

"vBCMS is coming Real Soon Now."
So are flying cars, universal health care in the United States, the Second Street subway, discovery of the Oak Island treasure, Godot, the revitalization and gentrification of Detroit, and Duke Nukem Forever.

With the outcry of vBulletin users begging for a CMS, why are there so few CMS integration hack/mod projects? Is there even a demand for integration with open source content management systems?

I don't really want integration. I've love a dedicated vBulletin CMS, I'd be willing to pay a hundred bucks a year for it if it was up to standard. Nice analysis though, but I expect the main issue is time! People just don't have enough time.

Very good post Cyburbia. I have also wondered the same thing many times.. I currently have vbadvanced stuck up front as a placeholder waiting for a better solution to come our way :)

After using vbulletin for such a long time, I find some of the open source CMS systems simply lacking. vbulletin's features like the phrasing and templating systems for example are far supiorer to what most of them offer.

Integrating these features into an open source cms would take a lot of work and it would be easier to start on something new from scratch.

If they don't have enough time for CMS integration - something a lot of people are begging for -- they certainly seem to have enough time for arcades, shoutboxes, various stat displays and the like. I'm not saying arcades are bad, but it strikes me as odd that such projects are getting so much attention, even though you don't see them on many boards, while CMS integration is practically ignored among vBulletin hackers.

The longest thread in the vB3.5 Extensions subforums is for the Drupal integration hack, with 1,662 posts. It may be amnong the longest on the board. If that's not a sign of a demand for CMS integration, I don't know what is.

I also wonder why there's so many CMS integration projects for SMF and phpBB, but not vBulletin.

Real Soon Now, just like high speed trains in Florida, the withdrawl of US troops from Iraq, and cold fusion. Let's take off our vB fanboy hats, and admit that a Jelsoft CMS is probably never going to be released.

I have considered creating a CMS several times and then backed off because Jelsoft has been hinting for years that they are making one. I have no desire to spend hundreds of hours coding, refining features and such and then have Jelsoft come out with one.

So, blame Jelsoft for a lack of free CMS projects. If they weren't really serious about doing one, they shouldn't have started hinting more than 2 years ago that they were. When the CMS talk first started, they made it seem like it was coming out directly on the heels of 3.0. The buzz and the hype killed off any inclination on my part to take on such a massive undertaking.

You really don't need to integrate a CMS with vbulletin...
all you need is an imagination, good coding skills (PHP/MYSQL), creating a usable interface, and money (note: time is money).

What exactly are you looking for?
Drupal is a good CMS ... why not try that integration?
(I haven't tried the integration but I do agree that it is a popular thread.)

just curious..

I have not found a CMS that will suit my needs after years of looking around the net. When I do I will attempt to integrate it but until then I'm not looking into it. I've looked into more CMS systems then I can remember, most of them open source. There was always something in each one of these scripts that didn't sit right with me.

Some were so complicated it took me hours to understand how they worked, if I even got that far. Others were poorly coded, or had bugs I couldn't live with. The rest were overkill for my needs.

vbcmps works great but it needs an article module to make it a real cms.
The reason i say that is because u don't really manage any content with it u just use it as a frontend to vbulletin

A truly great cms will allow us to create modules that are totally integrated into the forum. Search will work across all the modules (quizzes, articles, blogs,etc.) Comments on content would have the same UI as the forum - but wouldn't necessarily be in the forum.

Ideally, we could have content in many different categories - not just one. An article on Linux networking could be found under Linux and Networking.

If we could just get cross-posting and modular search into vbulletin, I'm not sure we would even need a CMS. It would just be a matter of careful modification design.

U really do have the idea :P

I want this soooo bad. I am using miraserver, which seems to be a dead project. It has great integration, but has zero add-ons. They are fairly easily coded, but I would love a great out of the box solution. I am not a programmer, and don't want to be. An official vB solution would be best, but a good integration would work too.

Drupal is more of a blog than a true cms.

the admin system of phpcow looks good, but they aren't really integrated with vB, just can share user database, like the Joomla patch.

Please vB, will you release a CMS and put us all out of our misery?

If anybody would be interested in coding something like this in a months time with me let me know.

Anybody have any idea where there is a good resource for cms systems? www.opensourcecms.com is good, but I'm interested in paid solutions as well. Just need to find the best one. Then we can try to integrate it.

amykhar; I don't mind of the cms is made by a third party or by jelsoft, so along as its a quality product. invision's power dynamic looks good, I'm sure I saw a quicktime movie showing you could have articles etc

The screenshots look impressive, and it's far along in the development stage. I don't want to switch to Invision, but if it lives up to the hype, I might be tempted to jump ship. It looks like a full-featured CMS, not a portal hack like vBportal, vBadvanced or vBindex.

I have noticed some animosity of CMS developers towards vBulletin, because it's not open source. There's plenty of integration mods for other content management systems and phpBB, Simple Machines and the like, but those asking about vBulletin usually get a response in the spirit of a Slashdot post about Microsoft. "Use phpBB, comrade!" "Start coding and improve our crappy forum module!" Sigh.

Interesting idea ... how does cross-posting work on other CMS applications?
Do they give the user the option to insert in multiple categories (could get ugly if many categories exist)? Is it automatic? Or, is it a search query that displays the titles?

Right away, I see a few problems on all the above options but it could be possible. It's just a matter of looking for the most economical and optimized route.

any comments?

Drupal does it better than any I've other seen. When a user makes a post, they are presented with a list of categories. They can select from those categories - more than one of them.

If you look at my site http://othehorror.com you'll see how the stories are sorted into appropriate places. A review of a Stephen King book shows up under Stephen King and under book reviews. If it happened to be a ghost story too, it would show up there.

that's what I figured ... can you provide a screenshot of editing area (as stated above)?

Personally I think vbadvanced has the potential to do everything you've stated in this thread. It simply lacks the right people working on it. So far its um .... Brian.

Yeah I think thats it. If there were 10 of him writting modules it could be as great as Amy here has been talking about.

IMO.

Here you go

thank you amy...

that's exactly what I thought it would be ... however, I don't agree on the multiple dropdown interface ... it's one of the least friendly form elements available

it wouldn't be hard to implement

oh, I forgot to mention ...
the url that you provided is giving me an empty page

That explains the lack of traffic :D Looks like I broke something the other day and it shows blank pages for logged out users. Off to make repairs...

Lol, loved your post.

I have been in the market for a commercial CMSfor our site, but after doing the research and trial and error I think we will eventually start to slowely build a custom one.

For our company it's not as much of the integration with vbulletin , but workflow.
We were using VirtuaNews , till we upgraded to 3.6.1 of vb and VirtuaNews decided to spring a leak and stopped working.

great speech Cyburbia!
I think, vbteam has a problem with marketing and analyzes.
Not investing in cms is a mistake.
Think a scenario where Microsoft (Bill Gates) ignored to research operating system market and rejected to develop Windows, by focusing just at Office packets working with dos.

I have to agree. My partner and I were just talking about this, we too have been searching for a CMS system to integrate with vB, and would be willing to pay a reasonable sum to get something flexible and **reliable**.

vBulletin should be aware that more and more people are jumping on social networking and lightweight forum systems integrated in CMS' like Joomla/Drupal. vBulletin is the reigning king of forum software, but they are (IMO) in some danger of getting caught in a smaller and smaller market segment as the CMS forum system become more and more capable.

Either fish or cut bait. Build an effective CMS to go with vBulletin, or commit to providing reliable integration systems for the big dogs in the CMS arena. That way folks would feel comfortable using vBulletin WITH Joomla and havng the best of both worlds. We've bought one of the bridges for vB Joomla ($50) but I'm NOT feeling comfortable with the fact that it doesn't work under 3.6.4 atm. Thinking about getting stranded with an inability to upgrade my vBulletin because the Bridge vendor dropped support for newer versions of vB makes me queasy...

At this point I think we've decided to drop joomla, and go back to using vbGeek's GARS system and some customized image handling to build the article system we need. vbGeek's stuff is very cool...

James

I do agree to this comments, Vbulletin should look beyond forums now, integrating Vbulletin with other CMS products....

ive wanted a dedicated vb cms forever. i use subdreamer for now. its alright, it uses vb users/groups and can force its own skin over vbulletins so it looks integrated, but its not really integrated because you still have separate admins and the only skin changes are that it adds a header. but, it does have some plugins, but most suck and are useless.

id pay $100+ even as much as $200 or $300 if it was top notch and worked and had an active development community behind it (not just one or two people doing it in their free time).

Subdreamer is not too bad, but I would like to see a serious intergration project with PostNuke .8 this new PN version has some very cool features and is, in my opinion, more advanced then most CMS's out there. The only problem with postnuke is that its community almost died.

Postnuke is the only one with a well figured out template system and easy to use backend. For me the backend has always been the problem with CMS's like joomla/drupal/typo3 I want a simple category or topic module and basic links.

For people who are serious about a real CMS integration check this:
http://typo3lab.ru/en/typo3-services...-to-typo3.html

Typo3 + Vbulletin Integration

I'll pay $300 when the sun don't shine anymore.......:rolleyes:

I bought a copy of Subdreamer. I'll glady sell my license for cheap. Also same goes for vbportal too. As an online magazine they're just not powerful enough for me.

I'm currently working on a CMS system that will integrate with vbulletin. The CMS is different but will pull the user info and login from vbulletin. if someone is a good designer and would like to make a template I'll give them a copy of the software. I have an eta of about 2 months. I'll see if I can get a live demo up. The software works great as it is, just need to make the bridge now.

What features are you exactly looking for? Just to allow certain users access to write articles on the front page?
Admin - add/edit/lock articles,add/edit categories, moderate comments
Writers - add articles
Users - can comment only.

Is anyone using PHPFox? It looks kinda cool and promises VB integration and I had a little corespondence with the coder and they are working on more integration.. I still haven't bought it yet though.

Hi folks,

What a great thread Cyburbia!

I have been using firstly Mambo and more recently Joomla. Great piece of work with thousands of addons - components, modules and mambots. The support is great, the community is great and supportive. You can easliy modify how you present your site. There is a lot of integration with many other Opensource products.

I originally had SMF bridged with Mambo/Joomla, which worked well having users and members logged in through the site, with comments linked from editorial (joomla) to the forums via a mambot. Users could log in/out easily. Members could be administered easily within SMF backend.

Then I saw VBulletin and after asking about integration bridging with Joomla and getting confirmation in the forums, I went ahead with the purchase. I love VBulletin but I am really stuck with no integration with Joomla. I have tried VBadavanced, but it is no where what I require.

Have a look at the site - It looks and feels integrated - yet I have had to knock off the joomla login/out to all just to log into VBulletin. Cannot have them logging in twice!!
I am not any good at PHP so have not the ability to integrate these two great products.:up:

And like Cyburbia, VBulletin needs and requires a good CMS to go with!
Lets hope it happens soon,

All the best,
Dave

VBulletin-Wordpress Bridge for 3.64 now testing this integration, if it works we have a very good solution here. :)

vbPortal I think could be the answer if more people worked on it, Personally I really like it of course there are a few things that bother me like it says make new post or whatever for adding an article but over all I think it really is great :) though I still hope that someday joomla will be fully intergated and ready to work :) Or maybe even a vbCMS to be hones this type of thing makes me wonder about switching to IPB...

Miraserver is back in development, with a new version in the works. I have been Beta testing it, and it is great. The integration is top notch, and it has everything you could want in a CMS, except for being free. But I think the price is fair at $99, and the team is very good at helping to customize the product further for whatever you need.

I have been a paying customer for over 3 years now.

www.miraserver.com

Personally, I'd like to see more development of vbAdvanced. Having a portal that adapts to vbulletin with login, styles, etc... is a great asset. Having a system that works into vbulletin rather along side is the way I think a cms solution should be handled.

Hello,

I may have not followed this thread correctly because what I have read seems like it can already be done, using current vBulletin features and a few mods.

I am thinking along the lines of GARS. It allows for the creation of modules, can use different templates that you create, and can be easily organized using the current forum structure. (It simply allows you to alter forums to use a completely different set of user defined templates.)

It has the ability to be used for reviews, articles, stories, etc. The possibilities are endless with it and only stops at your coding level and imagination.

It is based off of vBuletin code, so to me it seems like an ideal solution though it isn't a true CMS. It certainly can be used as one!

If you haven't already, post any ideas you have for vBa CMPS over at vBadvanced. Brian/Tigga is working on the feature sets for the next couple of releases. ;)