Successful conversion of my custom blog section to vBblog

[MPDev]

I thought I'd share a conversion I did of my blogging section:

http://www.extremefitness.com/forum/blog.php

I had been running a custom conversion of PhotoPost that allowed for users to have multiple blogs under different categories; but in seeing the new vBlog feature, I figured I'd give it a shot. I was able to write an importer to take over the categories, blogs and comments and even modified the "lastest blog entries" feature on my Main Index to pick up new blog entries from the new section.

We have some active bloggers, I thought you might enjoy seeing it.

[Brandon Sheley]

Congrats

How long did it take to code the importer ?

[MPDev]

About 2 hours - I used the VBlogetin importer as a guide and tweaked it from there. I had some 1,000 comments and used categories for my blogs; so I had to figure out how to map these into personal categories (created personal categories for everyone who had a blog in a public category on my system).

Feedback is mixed; users liked having public categories and an easier interface to finding other people's blogs based on subject. I'll give it another week to see if it sticks.

Update:

It seems my users are not too happy with the new format; looks like I'll be going back to my custom version. My users like being able to maintain several blogs and the "category" format of vB's blog doesn't allow them to easily see other blogs of the same type.

For example, we have Bodybuilding blogs and others like reading blogs in the same category; by not having standardized categories to choose from our users don't have any idea who is maintaining a bodybuilding blog or a personal blog.

Might need to "hack" vB's blog before I can go live with it.

[punchbowl]

Thanks for posting this. I'm just about to venture into providing blogs on my site and torn between the options.

so you're back to vblogetin now? Just bought a licence for that after thinking the official add-on didn't provide enough functionality but am a bit worried about server loads.

Good article vblog v vbulletin here http://www.ayyas.com/blog.php?b=786 worried me tbh.
Have you looked at MyGTBlog? Looks excellent.

Anyway keep us informed and good luck

cheers

[MPDev]

I am using my own custom-built blog - http://www.extremefitness.com/blog (based on the PhotoPost code base).

Basically what's missing from the vB version is the ability to group blogs into public categories. Many of our users like to be able to look at other people's blogs and do so according to the topic (like Bodybuilding Blogs for example).

I think what's needed are "public categories" where a user can associate their blogs to that public category and then people can click on that category for those blogs associated with it. Otherwise everyone's blogs are just out there are not connected in any way.

[d1414]

I'm not too surprised. I am very underwhelmed by vbulletin's blog. I expected better. Much better.

[Brandon Sheley]

I like that the users can make their own cats, but I do think it would be nice to have public cats or maybe a tag cloud that pulled from all the personal categories.

heh,, check my post count, I'm 1337