postnuke-vbulletin together at last!
 

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/Forums.htm
username maytest11 password newbie

Please respect that this is a live site.

That looks good. Are you planning on releasing it?

I have not really considered it yet as I have only just now finished the complete integration.
I was mostly just curious on wether this would even be something in demand or not. I have seen other "bridges" that share user information, but to the best of my knowledge my system is the only real "module".
It seems to me that most people here are so against postnuke, saying it's to heavy etc.. All I can really say about that is we have had as many as 1534 people online at one time and our server load was nowhere near it's peak.

Have you checked it to see what kind of query load it has (how many queries)? I'd be interested in it, anyway. ;)

How to check?
Obviously it would be totally diff depending upon wether you are loading just the vb/pn page or if loading the full pn site itself, like the homepage.

Great main page. Looks good. Well done. :)

Very nice look and looks well intergrated.... I like

Thank you, I appreciate the compliments.

The tabs are effectively copies of the ones from MSN...

great work... must have taken you quite some time to integrate the two so well.

It took about 2 weeks to complete what you see here. The coder who is working for us is absolutelly amazing.

thats probably the best intergration of 2 scripts i've seen so far

Thank you for the compliment.
Kudos go out to our new master coder. He is absolutelly brilliant, and has merged these applications together even better than I had originally hoped for.
The absolute best thing, is our members absolutelly love the new system. I have had virtually no complaints, and the registration and login system is so much smoother than on our last "bridge".

To be honest, a lot of people have been looking for this for years, the ability to use standard modules from PostNuke/PHPNuke with a VB forum, and intergrated features like memberships.
Please release it, I think you would make a lot of people very happy, myself included

Given the time I am sure it will someday be released. It is only the beginning of the script connector. We are still working on the photopost module and then we will apply the same technology to oscommerce so that people using either postnuke or vbulletin can finally have a real shopping cart option.

If anyone has other ideas of popular apps to be merged, please let us know, and we'll consider adding them. It would totally depend upon the application, and the demand for it, as to wether we decide to build it, and release this technology.

I was thinking the same thing about most of the layout...

"postnuke-vbulletin together at last!"

It's not accually together for use except for you. lol

Looks exceptionally nice and you have done an outstand job.

Good Work.

You are correct.
At the moment we are the only site using the new technology, though we are working as hard as possible to finish it up for release. There is a lot involved with scripting like this such as import scripts to populate either db depending upon which system you are allready running, and building the support website.

I would expect to have it released sometime within the next month or so, no guarantees on the time, just that it will be released. It was only yesterday that we finished the photopost module so things are progressing quickly. The only other project I want to finish first is the oscommerce cart module. We will then build the site to support everything.

6662:
yes you are correct, the theme is very close to what msn used to use. Obviously they are radically different now. I am still hunting for a seriously professional theme designer for postnuke. Someone who can "break out of the box" and come up with something very unique. I'm sure someday I will come across such a person, but I'm happy with the current layout for now.

I would however love to find a professional theme designer for vbulletin. It seems that most of the best ones, after searching these forums, are now out of business. I looked at every single site in this forum topic, and none seemed to be what I am looking for. Either they are way to heavy on graphics, which is bad for large sites, or they look virtually the same as stock with only a few graphic updates. That's also ok though, because the new stock vb totally rocks. Great job guys.

Kind of agree with you there about the themes, or lack of them. The thing is that with the overly insane complexity of the VB template system, most people just don't even want to bother with it. I made a attempt a couple years ago, took me 2 months of studying and work just to get it to work, and I felt like you needed a rocket science degree by the time it was all said and done.
And then, of course, they changed the thing on us with the new version, using xml etc, so I decided to myself to say the heck with it. I got a premade design, rather than spend more of my time trying to figure out the new setup.
Shame it's not like the other forum software, or PHP-Nuke/PostNuke etc. Themes were very easy to do, and if you experimented a bit with it, you could do some surprising things.
I'm looking forward to this release, personally, I don't need the shopping cart (I'm a totally free resource site) or the photopost (I use coppermine) but from what I have seen, this looks very good.

umm i remember your old site it was excellent @ Shiva
redo something
as i know that vb3's template system is actually a lot better then
vb2's by far

having a standard skin doesn't suit someone with your talents

Thanks for the kind words. Every once in a while, I still see one of my themes at a nuke site, even though they are two years old now. :)

Nowdays, working on converting the theme I have to a portal, which only has 100 templates, but most are just plain silly. Afterwards, once I finish my game project, I will have a go at a proper VB3 theme, depending on creative insperation that is.

I think your best bet for VB themes right now is extremepixels. A couple of their themes has some nice style to them, and they also include the psd files, which is a big time saver

Yeah, your theme is really nice.
I am still however waiting for the 100% width vs. promised months ago.
Are you going to build one that works with xanthia as well?
I sent so many emails to the site I bought the theme at that I simply gave up waiting for a response about the full screen vs. of this theme.

Page generated in 0.13366389 seconds (93.72% PHP - 6.28% MySQL) with 11 queries

The theme from my site was pre bought, couldn't be bothered at the time, and I remembered how long it took to get the old theme in, just didn't feel like spending the weeks needed. The portal conversion was not fun either, and just as out and out silly like the VB2 template system, but even harder to find things. Still have a lot of work to do on it, so I haven't even looked at the VB3 template system yet. But I can say I'm not interested at the moment, as they changed to a entirely different setup, and I don't feel it's worth the time or the effort to learn XML at the moment, just for a little web site like mine.

In other words, not my theme to build for Xanthia, so no.

BTW, all my nuke themes were 100% width. :D

hey, if you can release that at some point, that would be appreciated...and what Nuke version are you using??

As stated earlier, we expect to have everything ready for release by the end of the summer.
It has not really been a high priority for us, but it is coming along nicelly.
Currently we have 3.0.3 bridged to postnuke .726
We will bridge vbulletin to postnuke .750 at a later time. There are just to many issues with the new postnuke that we don't feel like dealing with at the moment. It seems that they changed the code so much that most modules no longer work with the new codeset, and there is no way I feel like digging through all the pn code to see what is going wrong with it.
Vs. 726 has been running rock solid for us for about a year now, and we have had zero issues with it.

Ditto... ;-) Patiently waits. :D

To me there are two options. vBulletin and the free, powerful Simple Machines SMF1.0 for my Postnuked sites forums. The forums that are available for pn now pale in comparison IMHO. I am waiting for either one to release a mod first and that is the one I will jump at.

any news on this release? I am eager!!

Can you give us an update on this. Thank you.

I am eagerly awaiting your integration.

I don't hope it wil be finish...
It was a great idea but too time passed and have not seen nothing until now...

Well I've been off the vb site for quite some time now. Between vacations, new nephews, and frankly mostly playing, I've had my hands full, LOL....

I'd like to offer an update as to the situation with the bridge since there seems to be continued interest in the project. At this point vb works perfectly. Photopost has worked perfectly since day one. Oscommerce was backshelved untill their new vs. is released. After having a number of different coders look into OSC it turns out that there is virtually zero security built in, and is quite dangerous to run as is, esp if processing your own cards.

I've asked our coders to completelly rebuilt the lost password system that vb uses as it's just to involved for the normal user to want to go through. It has great security and all, it's just to complicated for the novice to go through.

Second is the import scripts to go from pnphpbb2 to vb and vice-versa.
I do not have those scripts, and at this point have no desire to build them myself.

The real issue behind deciding not to release it as of yet is 3 fold.

1. We have zero plans of ever going to .750 or .8 on the pn side, so I doubt I would ever have the new system built on that platform for future upgrades. If the pn authentication system has not changed then I suppose there wouldn't be any work to be done anyhow, but I frankly have not even downloaded .750 to check. Of course we do plan on updating the code as vb comes out with updates as it's critical to our system.

2. I have finally given up looking for an encoding system that does not require the end user to have root access to their server. Having been down the road of releasing open code and having it flood the market via people sharing it, the one thing I do know for sure is that I would never under any circumstance release unencoded code, what happened to Magicx is the perfect example there.

3. Trying to have an automated site built that would create the "custom" code needed for the client purchasing it turned out to be cost prohibitive.
There is nothing I hate more than purchasing software on a site and having to wait untill they wake up for them to email me my code, that's poor business practice, and I'll never purchase from such a site again, esp after getting screwed 2x on those.
The least expensive bid I received was over 10k to build an engine that would take the url of the site the bridge is being used on and to encode that on the fly into the download for the client.
Between the money allready spent on the script connectors and the extra 10k for the sale site, I would have to sell hundreds of copies to just break even, and frankly I do not see that happening.
I am a 1 man crew, and honestly I cannot dedicate the time to be online everyday in order to fill the orders that would come in, not to mention the tech support involved in such a system (This upgrade is NOT for the faint of heart, and is quite involved).

Finally, how do you answer to all the people who want to "hack" their vb forums with the amazing hacks that are allready available, and I'm one of them.
As vb has strict rules against selling their code, we had to separate out the entire bridge to their own files with simple include statements in the needed vb files in order to get the system to run. Basically what that means is I cannot sell a "package" with any files from vb allready modified, and would have to resort to giving manual directions on installation, saying "insert following code on line x in file x from vb".
Well that's all good if your using a stock vb, but if it is hacked, well then that idea is out the door as well.
We have added numerous hacks to our own vb forums quite easilly, but that does not mean that we could ever cover all hacks, nor would desire to.

I realize this sounds quite pessimistic, and gives the impression that the bridge will never be released. That is not the case. I hope you can understand from what I have written here what our real obstacles are, and trully hope to overcome them all someday soon. I will try to post another update next week if anything changes.

I'm also really impressed with how seemsless this bridge appears to integrate the two systems. I've been running a Postnuke community site for 4 years now and have always wanted to invest in a decent forum such as vBulletin. The only thing that has kept me from doing so to date is the lack of integration possibilities. My Postnuke site is heavily modified and finally at a stage where I am not prepared to heave it over the fence for a vBadvanced CMS version like so many others have.

I have also been very active in creating themes from scratch for various game sites and community bulletins. I've also skinned several vB forums for others that have made the investment. I would be willing to offer my custom theme design services to www.annointed.net in exchange for the code needed to integrate the two systems.

I'll gladly provide samples of my work if you're interested in the exchange.

IconCube is a cheap encoder compartively:
http://www.ioncube.com/
CMSMerchant uses it and it has worked great for me.

I too have been using Postnuke for over 4 years now, I love it, but the message board pnphpbb and others just don't provide the power/features I need. I recently bought VB and I am also looking for a script/hack or something that will help me merge my two sites into one like you have done.

Yours looks great, I know I am already paying someone $250 to merge and add some semi integration, (users will have to log in twice) but that is the best I can find right now.

I hope one day you do release it, if you don't you will never recoup your investment externally and with icon cube you don't have much to loose. If you do you will be a stand alone site who has it thus giving you a better market share.

Good Luck!

I guess we should all go to dreamhosts site and pray he releases the module.

can you release it please?

Well if we look back it only works on pn726 I know postnuke is already out on 762 so even if he did release it, it would probably be obsolete unless your running 726 and vb 3.x

It does look like what everyone wants though. :)

In the end i dropped postnuke for subdreamer, no more headaches of finding the right module or weird people that post "i got it to work" but don't want to share :P

sure see how you are

This sucks! I like the mass amount of modules available for postnuke and phpnuke. Is there no way at all to make it work properly with vbb?