Cross platform mods

[Carnage]

I tried dropping this in the hatchery, however got absolutly no response from developers (how many people even have access there I don't know) so I thought I'd try this out in a more general sense.

How interested would forum owners be in modifications (I'm thinking major addons mostly eg ibpro arcade or some form of member mapping mod) which can run cross platform? By this I'm not refering to windows/linux I'm more thinking along the lines of a mod which would work on most if not all of the major forum platforms allowing you to switch to a different platform knowing that the mods you use are also avaliable for the platform.

Coming from a mod developers point of view, I want to be able to start supporting multiple platforms as it will give better business stability and a larger customer base. Also having looked at vBulletin 5 I also think that cross platform compatibility will make it much easier to support vb4 and vb5 with the same modification.

[Paul M]

Well most (vbulletin) people would probably be interested in something that works across say vB3, vB4 & vB5, and many already do (not so much vB5 yet, as its still early days).

I cannot see many people being quite so bothered about it running on other (non vB) platforms, you only really care about the platform you are on - and I dont think a great percentage are hopping from platform to platform.

[Carnage]

The idea for this hit me having studied vbulletin 5's addon system; it is radically different to vbulletin 4/3's system as such I felt it was impractical to try and offer a mod that works across both platforms. The only way to do so was to abstract out the core functionallity of the mod into a separate unit and then create a bridge to the functionallity for each platform trying to reuse as much code as possible. As I started work on this, I realised that it would also be possible to include a bridge for other forum platforms as well.

I was kinda hoping some other developers would be interested in this project as its quite a big undertaking, for example, some method for abstracting database calls to work over multiple platforms would be required. One method would obviously be to write database specific code for each platform (not that good...) another would be to steal the open database connection and reuse it in a libaray such as Zend_Db or Doctrine.