Joomla 1.5 Integration Questions
 

I am really impressed with what vbulletin offers from a forum, blog, projects and downloads capability but I want the front end of Joomla 1.5

I have done some searching to find out how do I integrate these two and haven't found too much for Joomla 1.5

Its very important to me to ensure that the contents of the forum are searchable from the Joomla search engine (usually done with a plugin of sorts).

So if a user enters keywords in the Joomla search box, it would not only search all the Joomla articles as well as the photos on the site but also the vbulletin content.

Can anyone confirm this is possible today?

I would like to have vbulletin be my user registration/management but sync with the Joomla site.

Is vbulletin capable of such magic or am I looking up the wrong tree?

I haven't used joomla in a very long time, but one that I know of is:

http://www.bbpixel.com/

It can be done. Actually, there is a newer Open Source bridge that works with a number of CMS called jFusion. Here are the links: jFusion on Joomla.org, jFusion.org

Dude, shouldn't you include the following in your suggestion re: JFusion?

From the JFusion.org home page as of this post:
--------------- Added [DATE]1229208970[/DATE] at [TIME]1229208970[/TIME] ---------------

Believe me, I AM looking for a VIABLE and RELIABLE alternative to bbpixel!

I sure wish JFusion was ready for primetime.

Does anybody ELSE know of anything?

I'm developing the vBulletin plugin for jFusion.

The beta release is set for December 25th. Believe me, if you can wait till the 25th, this is the way to go. User sync/dual login works like a charm.

As far as the search plugin, it's not there yet and doesn't exist that I know of. But the jFusion team is actively developing and this very well may be an option in the near future.

Thanks!
Alan

Hey Alan, thanks VERY much for your timely post!

I was hoping someone would make an encouraging post like yours!

The bbpixel chap made a great run at the challenge, but I'm sorry to say that there are too many loose ends still.

Namely as to browser compatibility in particular with Safari and Firefox. At least in the testing I've been able to do on it thus far.

RE: Search capability... I'm not concerned about that, as long as the plugins for SEO of Joomla really deliver as promised, and for Site Search, Google can't be beat, imho, so why reinvent the wheel? I hope JFusion will direct its resources not to redoing what somebody else (e.g. Google) is doing EXTREMELY well imho, but rather delivering a completely functional vB to Joomla bridge.

I can hardly wait. C'Mon Santa Clause!

All the best,
Jack:up:

--------------- Added [DATE]1229224100[/DATE] at [TIME]1229224100[/TIME] ---------------

This may be a hard one to answer, and of course I'm just asking for an estimate, nothing binding... But what's your sense of how long the product will stay in beta before full release?

I have a site that sorely needs this connection.

Somehow my hunch is I'm not the only one.

I'd actually like to see somebody start a poll on vBulletin.org about how many people are interested in a bridge between vBulletin and Joomla.

Has that poll been done yet?

I'm a noob around here so I defer someone else to do one if it hasn't been done, but I'd sure be happy to cast my vote!

HJ

I've been looking for something like that since vbb went out of 2.x(I think). There was some software released back in the day that integrated vbb and Joomla rather well. I guess sales weren't good enough to keep everything updated.

I really can't say because I just recently joined the team. But I can say that I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the stability of the beta when it gets released.

I hear ya about Google. However, I did go ahead and create a jfusion search plugin so that searching forums can be integrated into Joomla itself :-) It won't be released until after the beta as it is dependent on the new code in the beta version of jfusion. It will also need to go through some testing as I have only tested it with vbulletin and not the other forum softwares jfusion supports.

Thanks!
Alan

Thanks Alan...

After DE-installing bbpixel today (sadly), I am counting the daze until the JFusion vB bridge is available.

I hope the beta-birds swoop on all of the bugs and gobble them up quickly!

oh i can't wait for this... doing a site redesign and we're going with Joomla... wooooooooooooo!