Official vB CMS?

[Ian Gordon]

I have been thinking over the past three years about some of the ideas for creating a content management system for vBulletin. I have started and stopped several times, most of the times, i got discouraged because there was just a lot of talk about it but, no action. I don't know if the vBulletin staff is currently working on something but, I would like to suggest if nothing is being done in that area, that I get together with some people to create the basic CMS. This would obviously be heavily integrated with the forum software itself and be like an add-on.

One of the things I stuggled with was ways in which to classify data. One of the problems is because everyone wants different features and functionality. I don't know and it's confusing as hell. Anywho, I have decided on a simple form functionality that will use an interface something similar to the posting of a thread to create pages, they will have options to determine the following.

Pages - pages are simply HTML pages, they contain XHTML/XML/XSLT/JavaScript/CSS to display content. Using the current template system in vBulletin, I would tie in the templates to create common elements that appear for pages, headers, footers, submenus etc. In addition, I would use the forum system to create variables to represent dynamic data like: title, metadata, url, etc.

An article system, in a hierarchical manner would be the default layout where SEF URLs would be capable for mod_rewrite systems (sans index.php) to create nice looking URLs like: domain.com/section/sub-section/title-of-article, in addition it would be customizeable like wordpress for: slugs (/title-of-article/), sections (/section/sub-section/) and comments through forum autobot (think sitepoint). I think alot of people would be happy with this and I will try to make it as flexible as possible but, it's pretty much up to the user to decide how to display it as code will be open to change.

Blog Engine - The blog functionality would simply be voluntary the functionality would be there so you could add it like through an RSS feed to a page or even make it the default layout for a site but, it won't be something people need to use, just an option that lots would be interested in. It would use a forum, specially designated of course, to show data and of course comments through the forums and such.

Essentially, it would be like wordpress (read: blog and pages) for vBulletin but, not a seperate script and most of the functionality already comes from vBulletin itself. In addition to user authentication, content control, templating and secuity and settings all through the vBulletin CP.

Other than that, you have the vBulletin Hooks and Plugin system to add any functionality you want, this base CMS functionality was just necessary for people who wanted a site a bit more roboust that just a forum or wanted to tie together their static and dynamic content into one system without resorting to needless code hacks and incompatitble scripts.

It will probably take me a while (months ~4-6) to finish it, I have a base framework down but, i will probably have to scrap it. I will be studying the vBulletin coding style and try and follow it as closely as possible. That way it will look consistent and you will be able to view the code as normal.

If anyone wants to help out with graphics and/or development (coding) then just let me know, hopefully if it goes well it can be official adopted and implemented for customers.