Why BuddyPress is vBulletin's Big Opportunity

[donnacha]

WordPress MU allows thousands of WordPress blogs to be centrally managed via one installation. At the moment, this is mainly of interest to institutions such as schools and universities because it allows them to give each of their students there own WordPress blog under one central domain. It is also used by general websites offering blogs to the public, such as WordPress.com, or special interest groups.

A major shift will occur next month, however, which will make WPMU a must-have for community websites and, consequently, create massive demand for a vBulletin/WPMU bridge: the first release of BuddyPress, an official WordPress/Automattic project, which will turn WPMU into a Facebook-like social network, while retaining all of it's multi-blog features.

I am pretty cynical/realistic about application development and the time-scales involved, and I'm even more cynical about the general rush towards turning everything, including vBulletin, into a social network, but I have to admit that, looking at the BuddyPress demo, it is clear that, along with the upcoming complete back-end UI redesign of WP 2.7, Automattic employee Andy Peatling has created something of real value.

WordPress/WPMU/BuddyPress will explode in the new year as many existing community websites, with an eye to encouraging more user-generated content, jump at the opportunity to transform themselves into fully-fledged social networks and blogging platforms. vBulletin's attempts to tackle this obvious convergence, with their integration of social networking features and their $60 blogging add-on, are too little, too late, too kludgy. Their core forum product, however, remains an excellent option, especially compared to the standard WP free forum options and that is why massive amounts of people will be washing up here, looking for a bridge between WPMU/BuddyPress and vBulletin. The key point is that people, driven by a free, market-leading Open Source product, will be looking for a way to integrate it with a $180 proprietary product but running up against a brick wall - as it stands, vBulletin is not even an option.

Personally, I think vBulletin should get over it's obsession with re-inventing the wheel, it's not-invented-here prejudice and focus on creating an official bridge that will allow them to benefit from the opportunities created by working well with other companies' products. If vBulletin had the humility to recognize that Automattic, and the Open Source community that has grown up around them, have created the right products at the right time, they could cash in on this huge opportunity to sell each of those sites a $180 forum and strengthen the position of vBulletin in the market generally.

Of course, being vBulletin, they will fail to recognize any of this until it's too late, so, the opportunity will be left on the table for some enterprising developer. Personally, I would be happy to pay for a competent, supported bridge and, if I'm right about the demand for this, that developer will make a pot of money, gain a lot of reputation and establish a long-term earner for himself.

Jafo232 has already created and, for the last two years, has been supporting and improving the Complete Wordpress/Vbulletin Bridge, which shares both users and posting details between vBulletin and the regular WordPress.

WPMU's code, though based upon the regular WordPress, has some differences that would take a certain amount of work to adapt the existing bridge code to it. Although Jafo232 has no plans to undertake this work because he himself has no need for such a bridge, it has been suggested that the work involved is relatively minor, given the work that Jafo232 has already done. Indeed, it would appear that several people have already created adaptions for their own personal use but, sadly, they have not released their code for sale.

If WPMU/BuddyPress + vBulletin is something that you, as a website owner, would be interested in, let the developers know that the demand is there by adding a post to this thread.

If, as a developer, this is something that interests you, either as a solo project, or in concert with other developers who make themselves known here, please post too, let's get a picture of what's possible here.