Subscriptions module
 

I'm interested in buying a vBulletin license to be used by an academic community.

One of our main needs is a subscriptions module so that users can sign up for events like group dinners, parties, etc.

It's something like a poll or attachment that can be added to any topic. An admin or a mod adds a subscription list to a topic, and every user can sign up in the list, and add any number of escorts. The users can also sign off and remove escorts. An user can sign up, add or remove escorts, and sign off as many times as they wish during the time period defined by the admins. After that the list is locked and no more changes can be made.

We currently have a custom made forum with this functionallity, but we want to switch to vBulletin, so we need to know if there is any mod like this already or if it's possible to implement such this easily.

An example screenshot of a subscriptions list to a group dinner, which is attached to a forum topic on our current forum, can be viewed here:
http://www.ect-ua.com/subscriptions_list.png

Something like this needs new tables in the database and some template and core vB code changes.

I'm an experienced PHP developer and I'm willing to implement this myself if there's no similar mod already, but I want to know if hacking the vB code to implement this kind of functionallity won't bring problems on future upgrades, or if there's a "clean" way to do it that won't interfere with them and allows us to keep the board always at the last version.

Best Regards,
Tiago Nunes

That's perfect, if you are an experienced PHP developer. I have not seen a similar modification available, but this should be fairly easy. It sounds like your run-of-the-mill insert/view/delete kind of thing. A modification that has its own PHP files and tables should be able to survive the any upgrades to the 3.x series. However, this may not hold true for vBulletin 4 (as a programmer, you should understand why).

How can I make the modification in it's own PHP files and templates? I have to hack into the vB create topic, modify topic and view topic templates and PHP files, right? I need to insert new code there and maybe change some of the existing one to accomodate the new features, correct?

Where can I find general guidelines and tutorials on modification development?
Also, is there any vB source code documentation available for developers?

Regards,
Tiago Nunes

the best thing for you is to evaluate how the regular products are build from here... the bug is that if you are not licensed, you can not access the files, bad for developing externally...

Ok, thanks for your help.

When is vB 4 gonna be released? Is there already a road map for that?

There is no definite timeline for the vBulletin 4 series. However, the first beta is scheduled to be released in Q1 2009.