What do you think about Vbulletin vs Xenforo?

[Adrian Schneider]

It doesn't matter which developers are better. It matters which systems were built better at the time they were started. Since vBulletin 5 is basically vBulletin 4, which is basically vBulletin 3 (as far as baggage goes), XenForo is miles ahead. Until either system is largely rewritten, this will remain true.

XenForo is still a few years behind what I consider modern PHP development... composer for dependencies, a full unit test suite, business tests, proper dependency injection (that isn't a registry), etc. But, it's workable.

vBulletin feels closer to 5-10 years behind. Thousands of silently discarded errors, because you know, that means less defects in the system.

However, this gap is hard to fill until consumers either become more comfortable with modern tooling (git, SSH, etc.), or it becomes as easy as Wordpress (one-click installs for everything, composer packages behind the scenes). That is probably a ways off still, so it won't be for a few more years until we see it mainstream.

Or, you know, everyone can continue to do their own thing and maintain their massive gap in modern development. I sure love editing plugins in a database, through 8 layers of abstraction, all while being unable to track what I'm changing. It's still the early 2000s.

</rant>