vbDrupal vs. vbAdvanced vs. vbPortal vs. Joomla
 

I'm newbie and must decide which CMS to get if I go with vbulletin. Please tell me the pros and cons of each. I'm overwhelmed with info at the point and need advice. Thank you. What would you do?

first, you need to make a list of the features YOU need... each portal is built different and provide different results... vBadvanced is the only one to be really built from vBulletin.. the others are transitions points or bridges...

How do I compare what features each of them have? It would be great to see a list of things I might want to use so that I can make those decisions. It's tough because I have never administered a forum before.

joomla is full of security holes you should not use that unless you want your server flooded with exploiting attempts

why not try 'Subdreamer' as an option for CMS.

Hi emaij, I am quite a strong supporter of vBdrupal basically due to the Drupal platform and its ability to integrate very well with Vbulletin

there is a steep learning curve with vbdrupal however it is well worth the time invested. A little warning beforehand, the chances of wanting to give up are high and perseverance is needed.

The developers of vbdrupal do things voluntarily however most thoroughly, there is no rushed process and what they deliver is of the highest standard

the features are too numerous to mention in such a space however

Blogs
full CMS

are available

Cheers

ps.. I also use vBadvanced with my set-up, however vBadvanced is not CMS and cannot be compared to vBdrupal, there is no comparison. I use it mainly for display of vBadvanced blocks on my forums however vBdru has its own block system as well, so there is no need for me to actually use vBadvanced however I also have other hacks functioning with the forums

I dont recommend it.

That's an interesting comment.

Why not?

Don't forget Logicians webTemplates - VERY good :)

Don't forget vJoomla ! www.vjoomla.com - it's a Joomla! and vB integrated setup with Joomla! using vB templates !

vBA. :)

Its a piece of crap.

Subdreamer is the easiet of any CMS ive used however its missing alot of key features other intergrated CMS's have.

vjoomla will be better than vbdrupal ... as vbdrupal is quite hard to use.
vbportal is plain jane and if you should probably just use webtemplates. vbportal hasn't had any meaningful advancement for 3 years.
vbadvanced is what it is. Reasonable, but nothing great. It's much better than jelsoft's offering (nothing).
vBCMS exists, it's no better than vdadvanced, and it's in german.
Subdreamer ? No idea.

I would go with VBAdvanced, it's quite easy to customize, and robust, a short while ago version 3.0 was released, which makes customization even easier. Now you can add custom module positions anywhere you want.

i'm not sure about comparing it with other systems though, i don't have a lot of experience with them, all I can say is that I'm very satisfied with vbadvanced.

VBA :up:

vjoomla... i can see lots of possibilities here. Let's wait and see. :up:

Seconded. Hacks still being made and 100% free.


www.vbadvanced.com

One of the main reasons vJoomla uses vbulletin to control session authentication.

Still, as of version 1.0.12 Joomla has no known security issues that I know of. Care to cite any, or are you simply spreading F.U.D. for the fun of it?

Note - I am the author of vJoomla. I'll keep this free of bias as I can, but I want to be upfront about this.

Of the portal's vPortal is the only one I would certainly stay away from for the reason others have already given in this thread - no real updates for it have been done in 3 years. That leaves three.

vBAdvanced / CMPS
Advantages: This is vbulletin's only native CMS at present. This means all it's modules will work without compatibility issues arising out of bridging techniques. The product has had solid support over it's history and will continue to enjoy it I believe.
Disadvantages: Very small pool of modules when compared to Drupal or Joomla! vBadvanced still holds static pages in the template library which is, frankly, an odd place at best to put them, and a terrible spot if you need to have multiple people working on them. There is no timed publishing of content items.

Drupal
Advantages Drupal has the best taxinomy / content sorting system I've ever seen in any CMS. It's reasonably easy to install and setup. Version 5 has, I've been told, considerably cleaned up the module install, deinstall process. However vbDrupal has some compatibility issues with a handful of modules last time I checked. I also do not know if vbDrupal is on Drupal 5 yet or not. If it isn't I would hold off on installing it until it bridges to Drupal 5.
Disadvantages Drupal 4's administration is nightmarishly complex compared to either of the other two CMS systems listed here. Also, the strength of Drupal is in it's blogs - yet Jelsoft is getting ready to release a blog extension that may outperform any of the current solutions in this manner.

vJoomla
Advantages Joomla has, hands down, the most powerful component/module library of any of the three CMS systems listed here. It's backend administration is easy and intuitive to use as well.
Disadvantages:vJoomla is in beta -- and how many of the modules and components will actually run with it remains to be seen. Even when it does see release sometime near the end of next month it will be in the shadow of Joomla 1.5. Joomla 1.5 is rebuilt from the ground up and promises some real performance enhancements, but vJoomla will lag about 6 months behind. Finally, as a project in it's infancy vJoomla have the support base either of the other two projects here have - though Joomla itself has help files and support to make up for this somewhat.

I have two subdreamer licenses. The skins are hard to come by and they are not easy to make. I wanted a skin similar to vbulletin. Two quotes one for $400. another for $1500.
I am using vbadvanced and it is great.

OK first things first

vBjoomla

when a site tries to compete with others I believe they should really iron out their own structure set-up

The links are not working and when trying to register the following occurred

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /www/vjoomla.com/production/htdocs/forum/register.php on line 384

I will try to register again however I do have my reservations about a structure when such things happen

as mentioned previously, I am a fan of vBdrupal and one of the reasons is they do a professional job and don't rush things thru to please the masses, they do their job thoroughly. Of course I am frustrated to be waiting for vBdrupal 5 however I know that they will have done the job properly

there are so many persons out there who consider themselves coders and they put out hacks etc etc however the moment someone takes a look under the hood they discover that it is put together with selotape

here's hoping for more real coders and great hacks, scripts and mods

Howdy,

I've been interested in adding a CMS to PC101 for sometime now! I've been leaning towards Drupal but I have a quick question before I decide which CMS to choose.

Can I add Drupal (or any of the other CMSs pieces of software) if my forum software is not the most current? And... if I add it now (before updating my VB software) am I going to have problems with it later as I continue to add the VB updates?

Thanks!

Lyte

I was a subdreamer user, switched to vbadvanced...WOW great product, easy to install, easy to use. The guy who runs the VBadvanced board is on the ball. Gets back to any questions right away. It's FREE! If you can believe that. He should be selling it. He also has a links program that is developed for VB.

Hey man... give VBa a try

Pura Vida

To: Michael Morris

I have been reading for hours and this was the best read so far. Thanks for spending the time to explain it.

@Michael, If there is a thank you button, I'd hit it. The info you gave was the one I'm looking for. Trying to find the best CMS to link with my forum. Only to ask one more question. Does vdrupal can be customized so that it can look like a normal website? or is it worth the try using cutenews?

I am still on the road towards vBdrupal however I can say that the work done with Jafo makes the integration of Wordpress a good one

Wordpress can be used as a CMS too

I actually use both vBdrupal and Wordpress in different capacities

I will contribute my $0.02 here. I have been a long time user of GARS together with vBadvanced. Together with an unsupported connector available at the GARS site, you can do a lot of cool stuff with this setup, and create some custom content types. The biggest complaint people raise is no timed release of content, but this can be worked around by having staging forums that allow you to work on content before its moved to the production forums. But a few months ago GARS fell unsupported so I started looking for another direction (thankfully, GARS now has a new owner and should be fully supported as a commercial product again). I am liking vbDrupal a lot. In the great comparison by Michal Morris, he questioned its compatibility with Drupal modules and I don't think this is an issue. I have loaded a lot of custom modules in my testing, and thus far had no problems. Based on their website, the difference between Drupal and vbDrupal is very minimal and shouldn't be a problem for most modules. Here are some things that may not be evident from the high level search...

vbDrupal is complex, but at the same time its not really that hard to get going given some of the great video tutorials that are out there. Very few books on it though. When you are looking for help, look for Drupal stuff, not vbDrual as most of it applies. What vBDrupal gives you that is additional to Drupal is the following:

- Integration of user administration. It pulls all users from vBulletin into vbDrupal and uses vBulletins user adminstration going forward. If you register or login, you are always doing it in vBulletin, regardless of which side you do it on. I haven't tried it yet, cut supposedly this extends to vBulletin groups being able to be used for vbDrupal permissions and such... very powerful, and "safe" to the vBulletin person going in.

- Addition of vBulletin blocks in vbDrupal. You get blocks that let you show your latest threads and I believe even whole forums in vbDrupal.

- Ability to show vbDrupal blocks in vBulletin. I haven't tried this yet, but you can have your blocks from vbDrupal go back onto the vBulletin side as well. This means you can have a consistent look and feel on forum pages and non-forum pages.

- Adoption of vBulletin style into vbDrupal. This one I completely missed, but when you install this, it actually lets you use your vBulletin style in vbDrupal. This is a complete departure from the vbDrupal themes, and I've not completely figured this one out yet. You can still select other standard Drupal themes if you want, but you can also have it use your vBulletin style... and I believe you can modify it in vBulletin templates. I need to sort that out, because I am not sure if I want to stay with that or just go with a standard Drupal theme. I think you may give up some things like breadcrumbs over to vBulletin if you don't use the vbDrupal vBulletin style. Bottom line, is that out of the box you can get a site with vbDrupal that looks similar to a vBadvanced type site.

The biggest drawback with any of these approaches is that your content is now split... you can't do a single search of forum and non-forum articles. With GARS, you can. But with vbDrupal, you gain a world of capability because you can build just about anything with it and have to write very little code to do it.

here is an example of a site 'supposedly' built on vBdrupal

http://www.alltforforaldrar.se/

Hmm... I don't see a forum on that site at all, so I'd guess its more likely Drupal than vbDrupal. There would be no point if they don't have a forum. I did my best to find a forum, but since I don't speak that langauage I may have missed it.

yes .. that was why I put 'supposedly'

however I have spoken to the developer and he said he used the 'defaultangy' theme

here is his thread on vbdrupal

http://vbdrupal.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1172

I am working to see if it in fact can be done with the 'defaultangy' theme

on Drupal it mentions using the Zen theme for designing your own theme upon that

VbAdvanced is flexible, robust & an outstanding product.

The only one worthy of being a CMPS ;)

Credit where its due to those guys :D

I'm sorry, but you are totally wrong in this statement. I use vBadvanced on my websites today and it is a flexible, robust, and outstanding product, but that doesn't make it a CMS. vBulletin is also a fleixble, robust, and outstanding product, but its not a CMS either. A CMS manages content... vBadvanced doesn't manage content at all. In fact, vBulletin is closer to being a CMS than vBadvanced. It at least manages posts, which are one form of content. A CMS has to be able to handle the input, management, and output of content. vBadvanced is more accurately described as a portal. It can organize blocks of information that is stored in vBulletin, or allow you to create custom blocks that have nothing to do with vBulletin. The other scripts being discussed... Drupal, Joomla, etc., are in the CMS category. Not everyone needs a CMS. You can have any of the CMS scripts behave as a portal like vBadvanced does, but you can't have vBadvanced operate like a CMS on its own. Together with GARS, and the GARS-vBadvanced connector, you can get some CMS like capabilities in that you can at least have it present other content types besides posts... but even that lacks much of the management capability and relies on some custom coding to make it work.

Found this as I am totally confused by the term 'Content Management System' which may not actually mean the same thing between different people. This wiki article smooths off some of the rough edges [LINK]

Thats a good overview, and it also links to a list of CMS systems... which gets further complicated by the fact that the list includes things like POSTNuke and wikis that aren't really comparible to the classic CMS. I think that a lot of people throw around the term "CMS" when they really don't mean CMS. The vast majority of forum owners are looking for a way to add a useful home page and some static non-forum pages. They want to be able to show news on the home page, being fed by a forum. This isn't really even the correct definition of a portal, but it probably fits that better than CMS. If you don't intend to add other types of content outside of forum threads, then you don't need a CMS. With vBulletin adding blogs, they start to blur the lines.

vBDrupal all the way.

http://audiosubculture.com <-- I just made this with vB Drupal. I can also add galleries, blogs, audio for users, the list goes on and on.


vB Drupal stays up on security updates and is already working on getting Drupal 6 to work.

Well thanks for the essay but that was a simple mistake "CMS" instead of "CMPS". Furthermore I didnt think it warranted such a response as that is off topic and irrelevant.

I may be wrong but this topic is named Vbadvanced VS other portal systems. It wasnt named Vbadvanced vs Vbulletin CMS? LOL

one word of advice

don't jump out of planes they are made for flying in

:D

--------------- Added [DATE]1197041154[/DATE] at [TIME]1197041154[/TIME] ---------------

you better sort the database out though ;)

Is that a word or a sentence? ;) LOL

Look I wasnt after a confrontation, I was stating a point but appreciated mccollin pointing out my typing error :)

Glad you think my reply was funny and off topic. :confused:

The title of the topic is actually "vbDrupal vs. vbAdvanced vs. vbPortal vs. Joomla ", not "vbAdvanced VS other portal systems". Since two of those products are in the CMS category (and the first one in particular), your use of the acronym CMS was taken for what it was. The six replies prior to yours were specifically talking about vbDrupal which is a CMS. Replacing "CMS" in your reply with "CMPS" doesn't even make any since because CMPS is a product name, not a category of software. Of course vBadvanced is the "Only one worthy of being a CMPS.", because its product name is CMPS. So I think its fair for me to have assumed originally that you intended CMS for its real definition. Your original statement was that vBadvanced was the "only" one in the list of four "worthy" of being called a CMS. In fact, Joomla and vbDrupal are the only ones in the list worthy of being called a CMS. The others are not. So that was the motivation for my reply, and explanation.

It amazes me that people come to forums to supposedly discuss things and learn, and when someone corrects a statement, they get accused of being "off topic" and laughed at. Based on the following replies to mine, there is confusion on the term CMS and so there was value in my reply. This is how people learn... by sharing their views on something. It would have been nice if you just replied back that you meant "CMPS", not "CMS", rather than attacking my post.

Now, if its OK, I'd like to add something to the vbDrupal discussion that was going before.

I've been testing vbDrupal for a few days now. Its interesting that the Drupal template files have been moved into the vBulletin template system. I'm not quite sure how they are doing it, but it seems to work pretty well. You can readily swap between this "defaultangy" template which uses the vBulletin template system, and the normal Drupal templates that have nothing to do with vBulletin. This gives a lot of flexibility. I would like to understand better how this works exactly because it may introduce some limitations. I know one thing is that I've struggled with my forum templates for some time with incompatibilities between Firefox and IE, and now I'm right back into that with defaultangy. I was hoping to have a clean fresh start. Does anyone know if its possible to pull the defaultangy template information out of defaultangy and put it in a separate Drupal skin, once its generated? Then I could severe the connection in the templates, but have them starting in the same place. My problem now is some of the classes that are used in this I can't easily change because the change may not work right in all the places the class is used in vBulletin. Not sure if that makes sense or not. Anyone tried to do that?

Interesting discussion to say the least.

I don't care that much about CMS vs Portal, but something all seem to lack is a "bypass flow valve" in case of huge traffic.

I run a webbsite with 225,000 members and they will flow on occasion to the site by the 1000s, bottlenecking and bringing the site to a crawl.

I'd need a portal/cms front end, that shuts down and redirects to the forums main page when SERVER loads defined are exceeded, then resumes itself without redirection once things calm down again.

Do any of these products do this?