Will vBulletin fit my needs?
 

Hello everyone, this is my first post, (I already posted this at vBulletin.com, and they directed me here)

I recently decided to add forums to my Wordpress blog and was wondering if it was possible to somehow style it after my wordpress structure?

For example on my site, I have categories such as advice and humor, and posts within them. What I would like to have in my forums is a similar hierarchy, with my wordpress categories being different boards, and my wordpress posts being threads, where members can discuss what I wrote (and probably disabling blog comments in the process).

I don’t want to duplicate the content from my blog into my first post, I would prefer the first post to say something like “Discuss this post here” or something.

I currently had another version of forums installed, however they weren’t meeting my standards, and I’m not a programming, PHP expert.

I also have registered users with my blog, and could they integrate registry with my forums, so they wouldn't have to register twice. In other words, are these user integrations very flexible?

Also, is there some sort of program or plugin that could automate this process, where every time I make a blog post, a new thread would be created in the appropriate board? (I already have about 40 posts on my site, which I would like threads for, in addition to new ones.) Where is the link (if this type of programming exists)?

Hope this is being clear
Thanks

Anybody??

I'm trying to base my decision on whether to purchase it or not if it includes these sort of features.

What is your blog software?

vBulletin doesn't do that out of the box, but you may find a mod to do that. Like this one: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=134521

Thanks for the response,

Yes the software is Wordpress, and I was looking to see if it (also a mod, not necessarily vBulletin in general) could perform those tasks.

I also looked at that page, but it seemed to be mostly for user transferring, I couldn't find much about post-forum integration (like the features I mentioned in my first topic).

PS: With that plugin, can you bridge WP users over to vBulletin? (The other way around)

There are several bridges for WordPress and vBulletin:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=134521
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=133107

Like I said before, I looked at those pages, but they didn't really go into feature specifics, if what I wanted on my site's forum is even possible with those plugins.

Guess you'll have to ask the mods developers in those threads. I also guess that there's no ready script to do that in the open access, you should find someone who will code that for you for a fee or something, it's not a tough job, it seems. vBulletin is good in that there are a plenty of people who know how to code for it, apart from there being heaps of ready scripts.

Alright, thanks for the clarificaton, xtumen, suppose I'll have to go check it out.

Yeah, with those bridge mods you should be able to find a way to create a new thread each time you blog. Also, it would indeed be possible to set up usergroup permissions in such a way that only you could create threads, while any user can reply to them, thus providing that sort of blog structure you're looking for.

You bought the greatest board software currently available and here at vb.org you find tons of additions and great people willed to help but in some cases, and I think yours is such a special one, there is no product available that 100% fits the requesters need.

You can then take a solution that works and ask the author for modifications or pay a coder to make it working for your special environment.

Please do not forget that products normally come up because a lot of people wanted a modification or the coder simply changed something in his board for usabilty reasons or on a customer request, BUT products are normally not written on custom single request, except you're willed to pay for that.

Thanks for all the help everyone. Just wasn't sure if this sort of thing was already pre-made or not.

I haven’t bought the product yet, but was strongly considering it. I’m definitely not a coding expert, and I don’t think I could afford to pay someone to “special code” it for me.

Didn’t want to make any rash decisions and pay for something I couldn’t use properly. So I suppose I’ll just have to figure out just how much coding would go on behind the scenes of my forum, would there be any good (free) places to start? (Like I said, I’m basically a coding noob, and I’m not familiar with any vBulletin coding)

Does wordpress put out an RSS feed? If so you could use the vBulletin feed importer to get your post onto the site

My site does have an RSS feed, although I'm not sure what you mean, by "the site" are you reffering to the vBulletin forums I would want to install.

And could you choose which posts from the feed go where in the forum? (If the above statement is true.)

Jamestl2,

One of the features of vBulletin is its ability to import RSS feeds into a certain forum.

I believe he was saying that, on the Wordpress side, have your site generate the feed from your Blog. On the vBulletin side, have that feed pulled into one of the forums, thus having post blog posts in Wordpress and in vBulletin. That could be done without a bridge between the two software packages.

A caveat, though - if people commented on your blog, the replies would probably be pulled into vBulletin, but if people posted in vBulletin, the comments would not be posted on Wordpress. This is because vBulletin pulls the information from Wordpress in, but does not send it out again.

Reading your first post, though, if you turned off commenting on Wordpress, vBulletin would be the only place that users could comment, which seems to be what you'd like? After the post is created in vBulletin, you'd need to go back and edit your Blog post with the link to the vBulletin thread URL for people to comment on.

I was able to figure out that all my categories have individual RSS feeds themselves, so I just assigned them to my particular sub-forums, thanks for all the info everyone :).
(http://www.site.com/category/categoryname)

So there isn't a process that could automatically put links into wordpress posts that says something like "discuss this post in the forums"?

Sorry for the late response James. That would probably fall under Wordpress' realm, since it would require a modification on their end, not vBs.