Good cms to use along side vb?
 

Hey just wondering if anyone knows of good content management system's that work well with vb3 ?
So far I,ve found Nephp Publisher & Miraserver which seem ok.
Tempted by both but if there's better ones people know of it would be helpful :)
Thanks.

there have been a ton of discussions about this exact thing.. if you do a quick search, it should turn up quite a few results.. include in your search these terms: portals, cms*, vBindex, vBadvanced..

just have a look at the results generated by those searches and you should be able to come up with adequate results that give you enough info to make a determination or allow you to keep searching.. also check the vB.com forums.. there are several portal/cms based solutions mentioned over there, as well..

Cheers for your reply i,ve searched loads everywhere belive me :)
I'm not really into the portals like vbindex etc
Just want a good solid cms for managing lots of pages, reviews etc with some form of intergration with vb.
[high]* mmw goes off again to search about[/high]

there really isn't, what i would consider, a good CMS with vB integration.. you can always have a look at the miraserver deal.. but with the lack of updates on his forums, i question it, to an extent for the kinda bread he is asking.. also, no integration, but quality work, look into Mambo.. http://www.mamboserver.com

very nice deal there.. and of course there is always PHPNuke and PostNuke.. also, vBportal.. but i hear they may be having issues.. http://www.vbportal.com

i have been looking into typo3 recently.. http://www.typo3.org

but that is an extreme CMS.. of the calibur of something like Vignette.. not easy to setup, configure.. but hands down the very best free/open source based CMS there is.. Built in scripting language and template system from the get go.. but as i said, extremely complex..

Just trying out typo3 at the moment, very complex like you said but seems promising.
I can't belive its free :)

Cool.. Let me know what you think of it when you have had a bit of time to work with it all.. I wish i had more time to donate to messing with it, but as it is now, i have only had time to get it installed once, and yet to have a real chance of configuring it..

I agree... Typo3 looks like a killer-app... just look at its official tutorial section... those videos are amazing. Unfortunately, I think it is also an over-kill for my needs... so I go with something like Mambo instead.

Well, the reason I originally looked into it is to do a huge content site dedicated to all the games running under a specific engine and discuss the engine technology and things like that.. That right there is enough information to choke a horse.. But those plans are put on hold for now because of a couple of other ideas that are now in the forefront of my mind..

But I will be using typo3 on something at somepoint.. It is too nice of a piece of software not to get used on something.. Not to mention, as far as content management, I doubt there is anything in the Open Source world that will even compare with its ability..

Well, I'm working on a phpNuke integration with VB now. I'm currently rewriting the stories module so that it will post articles into the designated forum. Basically, you'd have a forum or set of forums that form a topic, like football, baseball, etc grouped into a sports topic.

The sports topic will have its own unique portal, ie Nuke will be modified from a single to a multi-portal. The portal will display all sports articles. the articles link back to the forum where the discussion on the article takes place.

You can queue articles for future submission. Even though they're in the database, they'll become active on the release date, at which time they'll appear on the portal and the thread will be created in the proper forum.

You will be able to create articles with no discussion - such as website announcements. They'll appear on the particular portal, but the thread that is created will be immediately closed.

Also you can set an article kill date. On that date, it becomes an inactive article and the tread is closed. It can still be viewed in the article archives, but it will not appear on the portal.

At present, the work is 70% done. I am planning on releasing this as VB3Nuke during the first week of May.

You can also read more about it here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=63394

I,ve given up on typo3 as its an complete overkill for my needs :(
Looks really good FASherman.
I take it the template system will be pretty much the same as phpnuke or will it be able to use your own forum styles?
keep up the good work on it.

I created a Nuke style the pulls its info from the VB style sheet. So when you modify your VB style, changing colors and table backgrounds, the changes automatically and immediately get picked up on the portal.

Or you can see for yourself. I don't think you'll need to register to do this either. Go to the main forums at http://forums.daily-web.info and select one of the styles. I just finished installing the liquid grey and classic styles for this demo. Now view the development portal at http://devsite.daily-web.info

The portal will change with each selected style, automatically. Of course, if this were more than a feature demo, I'd tweak those styles to look a little nicer.

I use this on My site and I AM QUITE HAPPY WITH IT :)

Virtuanews -> www.virtuanews.co.uk

Features list here -> http://www.virtuanews.co.uk/features.php

Admin Demo here -> http://demo.virtuanews.co.uk/index.php

This part sounds good, been trying to work this part out, how did you do this? Do you have one master style file (css) that looks at the vb default ?

As it turns out, css style info is a under specific parameter. Because of that, all basic VB3 styles are simultaneously accessable.

Now, if someone creates a style with special table headers, that will require a little bit of extra work. And I really mean a little bit.

This is what we call a good news/bad news post.

The good news is that the News content portion is about 40% complete. Take a look at what I mean.

The main default page contains news of all topics - the last X, X being configurable.
http://devsite.daily-web.info/

The individual portals contain only their topic info:
http://devsite.daily-web.info/index....=entertainment
http://devsite.daily-web.info/index.php?portal=business
http://devsite.daily-web.info/index....rtal=computers

I only put in a few articles to show what I mean.

The bad news...well, not exactly bad...but...

The portal information has grown to the point where a configuration file is no longer user friendly. It must now become a nuke table. Thats fine, but it means I have to stop and create all the admin functions to manage the table.

But as I ponder design elements, I realize that this will make the portals even more powerful. Instead of a 1:1 relationship of portal to topic, portals can and will have multiple topics. And each topic can relate back to multiple forums.

Here's an example. I can have a sports portal.

Linked to that portal are the baseball, football, basketball and hockey topics.

The football topic is linked to these forums: football, Dallas Cowboys, Pop Warner football. All of these are football forums, but belong to different categories; Sports, Dallas Area Teams and Youth Sports, respectively.

So, when I create a forum, I give it a name, a description and tag (index.php?portal=XXXX) and a graphic image.

I define an RSS news feed for it.

I define a set of forums from which it draws Newest Threads, Active Threads and Latest Poll info from.

And I define a set of topics for it to display as news.


Creating a topic is a similar process.

When I create a topic, it gets a name, a description and a graphic image.
It is linked to a set of forums.

Finally, when I create an article, it is assigned to a topic. IF comments are enabled, I select which forum to create a new thread in with the article as the first post. It can either be submitted immediately or queued for future publication by date/time.

IF it is set for immediate publication, then it can include a poll. The poll will be created in the same thread as above.

So, you can see with a little work, VB3Nuke is going to become a true CMS for VB3 with two-way integration. The portal will display forum info, but at the same time, the news subsystem of the forum will insert into VB3.

Anyway, I thought I'd be ready to release this the first week of May, but this makes it more like the end of May.

It'll cost a few more weeks, but it'll be a much better multi-portal CMS.

Here's some more info...

The admin panels for the portal table wasn't really as difficult as I thought it would be. It has been awhile since I've done any Nuke coding, but here are some screen shots...

#1 is adding a new portal, #2 the results.
#3 is editing a portal, $4 the results.

Deleting is pretty easy. No screenshot necessary.

Thats it. Add, Edit or Delete.

BTW, #1, the default, can never be deleted, only edited. It is the default behavior if no ?portal=XXXX is added on the URL or if it is an invalid one.

Things are coming along nicely.

Once you start working with it you'll find that Mambo is really a great soultion, especially is you are working on a content site with a lot of articles. I'm currently working on a new site that will have over 100 articles (each about 10 pages long) and Mambo handles is easily. Also the search engine friendly URL's should make it earier to get all the content listed in Google.

The problem, as I see it, with all these non-integrated CMS solutions is that they do nothing to foster discussion.

Integrating user databases is simplistic. I did that with Nuke in about 30 minutes. Big deal.

What we really need is something that not only displays news, but also posts it for discussion and links to the discussion. Nothing (so far) provides that. VB3Nuke will shortly.

One of the questions I was sked via email is if I can modify Nuke so that certain blocks are displayed only on certain portals. Using my own site as an example, can I restrict the sports scores block to the sports portal, the stock ticker to the business portal, the horoscope to enterainment, etc.

I took a look at the code and it should be easy enough to do. In fact, I'm sure I can code it so that blocks can reside in any subset of all defined portals. If I have a football and a baseball portal, I might want the sports block in both.

And I think I can do that and still have it ready for release in Mid-May.

Hi everybody,

I only can recommend Mambo. I tried Typo3 a year ago and find it too big for my needs. So I started with Mambo. Now I'm the webmaster of the two most successfull unofficial Mambo websites:

www.mamboportal.com
Here you will find tons of files for Mambo and also a module, which lets you show your last x posts from a vBulletin board.

www.mambers.com
This is where the community meet. Of course i use vBulletin for the communinty.

Well, it was easier than I thought.

The thing about phpNuke is there are so many darned blocks available, but I just don't have the real estate on the page to show them all. For example, there is a block for movies that gives ratings, reviews, basic plots and show times according to your area. But I don't want to waste page space displaying that everywhere.

So the idea to restrict blocks to portals is appealing. I could restrict that block to show only on the entertainment page.

Anyway, take a look at this:

http://devsite.daily-web.info/index....rtal=entertain [Displays HOROSCOPE block]
http://devsite.daily-web.info/index.php?portal=sports [Displays SPORTS SCORES block]
http://devsite.daily-web.info/index.php?portal=business [Displays STOCK TICKER block]

So now I have ALOT more page space to manage. Every portal can have unique blocks, unique news, unique polls, display unique forum info (new threads, most active threads, etc)

For those of you that exchange/sell banner advertising...thats a whole lot more pages for page impressions.

Pictures being worth 1,000 words, etc...

Here is the block admin modified to display blocks only on select forums...

Would you need to edit the functionality of the nuke plug ins or does it still retain the drop in functionality? What you've done so far looks great. How is it query wise? yeah I know it depends on the blocks - its just that ive always heard nuke was horrible with that.

The standard Nuke modules/blocks will continue to work without any need to "port". That was one of my biggest complaints about vbPortal. I had to try to port standard Nuke blocks/modules to their format and it wasn't always successful.

What I've rewritten is VERY query friendly in the user space. In mainfile.php I try to read in as much info as possible at one time and then carry it forward as global variables.

I wish I could say the same in the administration portion, but thats not user facing so it isn't queries multiplied by concurrent users, etc.

I have also looked into many diff cms throughout the years. I ended up choosing postnuke as my cms of choice. The only problem I found was that phpbb really didn't have the power that vbulletin has. I then looked at the vbulletin cms, but that was so lacking in the type of modules that I needed that I droped that as well. So we decided to to build a script-connector for the two applications.

My main focus was to not touch the core of postnuke or vbulletin at all, that way updating is easy and would not mess up my system. The only changes are a few include statements to the vb files themselves that make the call to the script connectors.

It took a few months to get everything working the way I wanted it to, but finally we have vbulletin as a "true" module for postnuke. Next we will tackle turning photopost into a module. There is nothing wrong with the way that photopost grabs the header/footer info from vbulletin, but that's quite weak in my opinion, especially if you are trying to maintain the same look and feel throughout the entire website. I suspect that photopost will be totally finished within the week. Just need to fix their horrible authentication code.

Here is a list of requirements that I had before starting.
1. I wanted only one registration system for both pn/vb, we chose to use vb as it's much better, and more easilly modified.
2. I wanted only one login for both systems. Sites that run 2 separate engines that require diff logins or even diff user/pass are just plain tacky.
3. I wanted the system to recognize that if someone changed their profile information in vb that it would reflect the changes in pn. Things like if a person changes their password, it should auto change in both systems.
4. I wanted a seamless integration of vb into postnuke so that the header/left navigation/footer from postnuke would show properly on all vb pages. NO, iframes were not used, that's even tackier.... LOL
5. I wanted a true postnuke block to display the most recent threads on the pn homepage
6. I wanted built in group switching, so that if i promote a person to moderator in the forums, they also become a moderator in the postnuke side, or vice versa
7. I wanted spider friendly url's for at least the top level cats and threads.

Basically when you narrow it all down, I wanted to make vbulletin into a module for postnuke without really having to touch either system code wise, as we upgrade each time there is one.

If you would like to see it in action goto
www.annointed.net

Please respect that this is a live site.

Dazz]I currently use vbPortal at www.swgbounties.com and have been since 2.x. 3.x is currently in beta 2 but there are no major bugs at all. Works beautifully. They are currnetly tweaking the system a bit and adding more features. Overall I think it's by far the best cms out and specifically made to be used with vBulletin.

Try Subdreamer(http://www.subdreamer.com). Nice cms for a news site, with good skins and modules. Has both vB3, vB2 and phpBB integration, can display latest forum topics.

Yes I also did use vbportal at first. It is a decent cms, especially if you are not able to bridge other management systems. I just found that if you are trying to run a very diverse website with many different types of content that the nuke type cms are much more robust.
To the best of my knowledge, I have not seen any video, audio, shopping cart type of modules for vbportal. There are just so many more features that the nuke cms offer that it was well worth my time to have the applications bridged.
I would say if you are only looking to extend vbulletin with a few extra news type of mods then vbportal does the job great. If you are looking for a huge amount of tools to offer your members, then nothing at this point compares to the nuke type of content management systems.
The integration between the two engines is completelly seamless in our setup. A person who comes does not notice any difference of operation of the two separate systems.
view it live at www.annointed.net