www.ScooterResource.com e107 CMS Alternative

[scooterresource]

Hello,

I own The Scooter Resource (www.scooterresource.com) which is currently the largest online freestyle scooter community in the world and I would like to keep it that way. I am currently running a free CMS called e107 and it has served it's purpose for the last 5 years but within the past few months I have been plagued with slow load times, load errors, glitches everywhere and sometimes total site failure. I have over 7,000 members which I estimate at least half are active on a monthly basis and they are starting to get irritated as am I with my sites performance. The reason I was using a CMS was because I did not just want a forum, I wanted the ability to post news, articles, reviews, interviews, etc. and to really be the central hub of information for our sport which it has been but e107 just isn't cutting it. I also need the ability to dedicate space for advertisements to generate revenue to help fund this site.

From the looks of it, I think vBulletin can easily handle all of my forum needs but I also need something to manage the rest of my content. Are there any recommended CMS's that are relatively easily integrated with the vBulletin forum to create one fluid content driven site?

[BSMedia]

Wordpress
vBAdvanced
Jelsoft releasing CMS sometime soon I guess

And there are a couple other ones floating around

[scooterresource]

Is vBAdvanced not a Jelsoft product?

[KW802]

Originally Posted by scooterresource

Is vBAdvanced not a Jelsoft product?

"vBadvanced" is the company name for a vendor that has released several add-ons for vBulletin. vBadvanced CMPS is a free portal for vBulletin.

Ref: http://www.vbadvanced.com

For your needs, you may want to check out either vBadvanced CMPS, which pulls threads from your forums, or vBadvanced Dynamics which, while still requiring vBulletin for the back-end, stores it's entries (articles/blogs/whatever) in seperate tables.

[scooterresource]

Does the Dynamic version still have the ability to pull from threads as well as storing it's own separate entries?

[KW802]

Originally Posted by scooterresource

Does the Dynamic version still have the ability to pull from threads as well as storing it's own separate entries?

Not apparently. To clarify that answer... CMPS is a terrific portal that is pretty flexible and through the use of "modules" it can be used to display just about anything. Dynamics is a flexible system that, at it's heart, is a system of storing entries that can be made to resemble any number of different systems (eg: people are using it articles, blogs, reference listings, etc.) and it incliudes a lot of the functionality of CMPS but not all of it (two different packages to fill two different needs). One of the things it can do like CMPS can is to work with different modules.

So with that said... by default the Dynamics pages are geared towards displaying the content stored in it's tables but by using modules you could also, for example, have a block on the page displaying the latest threads from the forums but the main 'focus' of the page would be the Dynamics content.

CMPS is a free product available for download at the vBa support site. Dynamics has a cost associated with it.

Oh, and a disclaimer... I am a staff member over at vBa. To avoid anybody accusing me of turning this into a sales pitch thread, if you post over at vBa in the pre-sales forum we can go into more detail as to whether Dynamics would be best choice or not. Either way, though, if you convert to vBulletin, vBa CMPS (portal) is freely available and has a transparent install so you can always install it to experiment with without your users ever knowing about it.

[TigerC10]

I like to use Subdreamer. It works VERY nicely with vBulletin integration, and it's got a modification system that is just as good as vBulletin's.