For $11 more, you can purchase Xenforo ($160 USD) which is already fully responsive, secure, and fully supported for the latest versions of PHP, etc.
I haven't developed on vBulletin in many years, having switched to XenForo probably 8 years ago, I wasn't impressed especially not with the price. Having now developed in React and running a SEO company, the speed differences just in rankings alone tied together with the user experience make it worth building something custom to out perform your competition. However, those with little to no developer experience are between a rock and a hard place. There are options such as NodeBB, but it did not live up to my expectations. While it is quicker to develop for than Discourse would be, there's one forum software that I've been following for the past few years that just launched their first stable release.
Flarum is built on PHP and Javascript, so those familiar with developing for vBulletin will have a better understanding of the underlying code architecture. It does have some server requirements that make shared hosting near impossible with PHP Composer, but for an Open Source forum platform, it's amazing. I personally love composer, when the PSR-4 standard came out it was game changing.
07-11-2021, 02:59 PM
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