Is vBulletin still a choice?
 

Hi there

I want to launch new project, which depends on WordPress as CMS platform, and I want to build a community in this project, so all suggestions that I get referring to use Buddypress/bbPress, but as you know the bbPress forum is poor in regarding to legacy forums features, but it has strong advantages specially when we talking about integration with WordPress and for support.

I want to give vBulletin a try before make my final decision, and as we all know vB4 still preferred by site owners over using vB5, and I know vb very well and use it from 2001 in my site.

So what do you think? can I use vBulletin in this project and try to make some customization to suite what I need, or this will be stupid decision?

Interesting to read your opinions.

Sincerely Yours.

I think you should use vBulletin 5 over vBulletin 4 or WordPress. I'm not sure what you've heard about it but it's the best option for bloggers who also want a forum.

Thank you for your reply, and let me explain a little bit ..
As you know vB4 has long set of products to do almost anything you need, in another hand vB5 has small list of plugins available in the market.

For my purpose I need WordPress not a simple blogging platform, the needs for a forum just to hold the community part.

What is it you think WordPress does that vBulletin 5 does not do? Maybe you're right but there is no bridge between vBulletin 5 and WordPress and vBulletin 4 is no longer being developed so at some point it's not going to work with the SQL and PHP standards. There are good portions of the code that are not even HTML5 and CSS3 compliant. I wouldn't advise anyone to use it to begin a new forum for those reasons.

If you absolutely need WordPress you can set it up as your index page and have the forums as a subordinate URL but as someone who has been using vBulletin 5 since its initial release and and WordPress since its initial release I can tell you that for most intents and purposes vBulletin 5 does everything WordPress does and some things WordPress does not do.

I'm not paid to sell vBulletin so I'm not pushing it on you but using one solution is always easier than using two different ones.

Thank you In Omnibus

There are 2 reasons to not use vB5 in this project, the first one is lake of bridge software between it and WordPress and the seconed is the poor support from plugins developers community.

Thanks.

Yes I agree that there's poor support for vbulletin 5, considered by many to be a flop and a major reason for board owners to move away from vbulletin.

Now vbulletin 3 and 4 both are still widely supported and have new mods coming out from time to time.

Glenn Vergara might take exception to the poor support from plugin developers comment.

The problem is more that most of the third party developers here were hackers, not real coders. They were frightened and confused by the API and the lack of hooks.

You can go to another platform but you're going to pay every time they upgrade and you're going to pay for every mod or add-on individually. It gets expensive quickly.

Thank you again In Omnibus, and yes Glenn Vergara make very nice work, but I think he is alone in the market right now, so plugin developer community can't depends on only one creative man like him!!

Just want to invite you to visit my forum :-)

vBulletin is still my choice for forums, you can start with vBulletin and in the case you want to try another forum software you still can move it to another one without any problems. :)