Using vBulletin + Addons as a CMS for a large website
 

Does anyone use vBulletin to run their entire website, beyond their forum? We are contemplating this and would like to know if there are any medium to large websites out there doing this but with a design and functionality something like www.yogajournal.com and www.fitpregnancy.com

Anyone? Thanks!

Its possible and its been done before, however it takes extensive modification to templates and the code, Sitepoint.com is a good example of a large one

Thanks. Do you know of any other sites doing so and achieving the sort of look and feel of the sites I linked to?

you'd be better off using wordpress to achieve something like that. Does the yoga one even have a forum?

at my site dcemu we use vbulletin and lots of mods to use vb as a forum and also to post news across 25 sites, not really sorted out a decent downloads system but we are adding new stuff when ever we see.

I am currently coding my site like this

www.modelscheme.com

Why wordpress and not vB?

Someone is developing a integration multiple forums with joomla and vbulletin is one of them. It is still very early in it's devlopment and I haven't really tried out newer releases but check it out at http://www.jfusion.org

Not sure if it will fit your needs or what you want but something to check out!!

As we were considering Joomla and Drupal we opted for Drupal for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the ability to create a much broader taxonomy. I'm not sure how vBulletin + something like vBAdvanced might work in this regard too. Which is why I'm asking and exploring the idea of using it as a CMS. But thanks for the info. :)

Because WP can be used as a CMS, and vBulletin really should just stick to being a forum.

I would recommend Drupal, if you have the time and patience to learn its learning curve, that is. Drupal is what I run my site off of now, and you can easily integrate vBulletin with it (though it does only work for Drupal 5.X, and not 6.X).

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...kage_id=228684

Thanks for explaining. I appreciate all the information and find myself more hesitant now about using vB for the site pages.

So I guess my question to you now would be - what does Drupal offer that Wordpress doesn't?

Well, the main difference is that Wordpress is blogging software that CAN be used as a CMS. Drupal itself IS a CMS. But for me, personally.. If I'm building a website for a company, or a personal portfolio, I would use Wordpress.. but if I wanted a community driven website, I would use Drupal.

Does that make sense? I won't lie to you, Drupal is and can be a little frustrating to work with. It's nothing that I couldn't get past, and a lot of it is knowing which modules to use, but the community at Drupal is really helpful in that field.

We have had some concerning feedback regarding vbDrupal so we really don't want to bridge our forum with Drupal in that way. If we went with Drupal it would be as a stand alone CMS. We'd do what we could to feed some content in from the forums to achieve a bit of connectivity between the site and forum. But it would not be a community-driven website if we use Drupal.

So I'm guessing you would say we should use Wordpress. Right? :)

Well, to be honest.. I would say give them both a whirl.. see which one you like better. From what it sounds, either one of them would be able to do the job for you, it would probably just come down to your own personal preference.

I haven't used vBDrupal for probably over a year now, so I'm not sure of any current issues or concerns with it, but there are other alternatives. I imagine that you'd at least want your forum members to comment on your cms content pages, no?

Our server administrator is the person who advised us against vbDrupal. Something about a "nightmare" of issues because we have such a large database.

We're exploring the vB idea because we would like the connection and member accounts to carry over with privileges, yes. But it's not the final decision-maker in selecting a system. A nice side. We have to achieve the look and fell and functionality we want above all else. If vB and vBAdvanced can do it - great! We'll certainly go that direction. If not, we'll now look at Wordpress instead of Drupal.

I did get something from our designer today about integrating wordpress with vB. I have to look at that too.

Thanks for the info and ideas!