[Michael Morris]

Originally Posted by TheMusicMan

Hi Michael: Database Layer, Functional Layer, Presentation Layer i.e. templates, themes, styles etc.

I see you have coded vJoomla to utilise the vB template system - not the way around I would have wanted as I believe there are many more effectove CSM type styles out there for Joomla/Mambo than vB (vB is not a CMS, Jomla and Mambo are more close to it) - so for me I guess that's a shame. I would say people who would want this bridge would want it to add CMS functionality to their forum and NOT forum functionality to their CMS.

Super work though... as Mr Bob said above... kudos.

Until a stable release of Joomla 1.5 what you desire isn't possible. We won't have a stable release of that platform for at least another year and I need to revise vbulletin site still stuck on 3.0 NOW. I use Joomla at work and I really don't want to work any longer with the portal systems available for vbulletin. While I appreciate the hard work that has gone into them, they are ultimately insufficient for my needs.

Your defense of Joomla's "template" engine doesn't impress me. Joomla! templates SUCK. They aren't proper CSS, yet they require CSS to attempt to style them (good luck considering most Joomla components as written are table cities). They suck so bad that I use a modified version of Joomla commericially that rewrites key files to use the patTemplate engine to draw the html, instead of the asinine default Joomla! approach of putting html output into class files that are nigh unreadable (Could be worse though - could be OS Commerce). Considering they will be DEAD ANYWAY once Joomla 1.5 is released I'm not going to cry for them.

So yes, vJoomla grafts Joomla! onto vbulletin - it doesn't allow the reverse at present. I can't conceive of a reverse either - I'm never seen a pure CMS system with more than a handful of users (though I'm sure they are out there) though any vbulletin board worth it's salt has at least a couple hundred (or in my case a couple hundred thousand) user accounts to worry about if you were ever to merge them.

You also completely missed one final point. When it comes down to it - bbpixel is illegal. vJoomla is not. I put all the hacks in the Joomla code because, in the end, I will be re-releasing it under the GPL as a seperate package. The beautiful part of Open Source and the GPL license is you can do this under it. If I where to modify and distribute any part of the vbulletin code (as bbpixel does) this would be a violation of Jelsoft's commerical license.

I plan for vJoomla to be around for the next couple years as a branch off the Joomla 1.0 trunk, development of which has ceased in favor of 1.5. (So there should be a minimum of problems with 1.0 compliant components and modules). When 1.5 is released I will then develop a version for 1.5 which - if all the hype around 1.5 is true - should be possible without executing any code hacks in 1.5.