vbDrupal vs. vbAdvanced vs. vbPortal vs. Joomla

[Clayton]

OK first things first

vBjoomla

when a site tries to compete with others I believe they should really iron out their own structure set-up

The links are not working and when trying to register the following occurred

Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /www/vjoomla.com/production/htdocs/forum/register.php on line 384

I will try to register again however I do have my reservations about a structure when such things happen

as mentioned previously, I am a fan of vBdrupal and one of the reasons is they do a professional job and don't rush things thru to please the masses, they do their job thoroughly. Of course I am frustrated to be waiting for vBdrupal 5 however I know that they will have done the job properly

there are so many persons out there who consider themselves coders and they put out hacks etc etc however the moment someone takes a look under the hood they discover that it is put together with selotape

here's hoping for more real coders and great hacks, scripts and mods

[Lyte]

Howdy,

I've been interested in adding a CMS to PC101 for sometime now! I've been leaning towards Drupal but I have a quick question before I decide which CMS to choose.

Can I add Drupal (or any of the other CMSs pieces of software) if my forum software is not the most current? And... if I add it now (before updating my VB software) am I going to have problems with it later as I continue to add the VB updates?

Thanks!

Lyte

[vcruiser]

I was a subdreamer user, switched to vbadvanced...WOW great product, easy to install, easy to use. The guy who runs the VBadvanced board is on the ball. Gets back to any questions right away. It's FREE! If you can believe that. He should be selling it. He also has a links program that is developed for VB.

Hey man... give VBa a try

Pura Vida

[tazzarkin]

Originally Posted by Michael Morris

One of the main reasons vJoomla uses vbulletin to control session authentication.

Still, as of version 1.0.12 Joomla has no known security issues that I know of. Care to cite any, or are you simply spreading F.U.D. for the fun of it?


Note - I am the author of vJoomla. I'll keep this free of bias as I can, but I want to be upfront about this.

Of the portal's vPortal is the only one I would certainly stay away from for the reason others have already given in this thread - no real updates for it have been done in 3 years. That leaves three.

vBAdvanced / CMPS
Advantages: This is vbulletin's only native CMS at present. This means all it's modules will work without compatibility issues arising out of bridging techniques. The product has had solid support over it's history and will continue to enjoy it I believe.
Disadvantages: Very small pool of modules when compared to Drupal or Joomla! vBadvanced still holds static pages in the template library which is, frankly, an odd place at best to put them, and a terrible spot if you need to have multiple people working on them. There is no timed publishing of content items.

Drupal
Advantages Drupal has the best taxinomy / content sorting system I've ever seen in any CMS. It's reasonably easy to install and setup. Version 5 has, I've been told, considerably cleaned up the module install, deinstall process. However vbDrupal has some compatibility issues with a handful of modules last time I checked. I also do not know if vbDrupal is on Drupal 5 yet or not. If it isn't I would hold off on installing it until it bridges to Drupal 5.
Disadvantages Drupal 4's administration is nightmarishly complex compared to either of the other two CMS systems listed here. Also, the strength of Drupal is in it's blogs - yet Jelsoft is getting ready to release a blog extension that may outperform any of the current solutions in this manner.

vJoomla
Advantages Joomla has, hands down, the most powerful component/module library of any of the three CMS systems listed here. It's backend administration is easy and intuitive to use as well.
Disadvantages:vJoomla is in beta -- and how many of the modules and components will actually run with it remains to be seen. Even when it does see release sometime near the end of next month it will be in the shadow of Joomla 1.5. Joomla 1.5 is rebuilt from the ground up and promises some real performance enhancements, but vJoomla will lag about 6 months behind. Finally, as a project in it's infancy vJoomla have the support base either of the other two projects here have - though Joomla itself has help files and support to make up for this somewhat.

To: Michael Morris

I have been reading for hours and this was the best read so far. Thanks for spending the time to explain it.

[nyunyu]

@Michael, If there is a thank you button, I'd hit it. The info you gave was the one I'm looking for. Trying to find the best CMS to link with my forum. Only to ask one more question. Does vdrupal can be customized so that it can look like a normal website? or is it worth the try using cutenews?

[Clayton]

I am still on the road towards vBdrupal however I can say that the work done with Jafo makes the integration of Wordpress a good one

Wordpress can be used as a CMS too

I actually use both vBdrupal and Wordpress in different capacities

[mccollin]

I will contribute my $0.02 here. I have been a long time user of GARS together with vBadvanced. Together with an unsupported connector available at the GARS site, you can do a lot of cool stuff with this setup, and create some custom content types. The biggest complaint people raise is no timed release of content, but this can be worked around by having staging forums that allow you to work on content before its moved to the production forums. But a few months ago GARS fell unsupported so I started looking for another direction (thankfully, GARS now has a new owner and should be fully supported as a commercial product again). I am liking vbDrupal a lot. In the great comparison by Michal Morris, he questioned its compatibility with Drupal modules and I don't think this is an issue. I have loaded a lot of custom modules in my testing, and thus far had no problems. Based on their website, the difference between Drupal and vbDrupal is very minimal and shouldn't be a problem for most modules. Here are some things that may not be evident from the high level search...

vbDrupal is complex, but at the same time its not really that hard to get going given some of the great video tutorials that are out there. Very few books on it though. When you are looking for help, look for Drupal stuff, not vbDrual as most of it applies. What vBDrupal gives you that is additional to Drupal is the following:

- Integration of user administration. It pulls all users from vBulletin into vbDrupal and uses vBulletins user adminstration going forward. If you register or login, you are always doing it in vBulletin, regardless of which side you do it on. I haven't tried it yet, cut supposedly this extends to vBulletin groups being able to be used for vbDrupal permissions and such... very powerful, and "safe" to the vBulletin person going in.

- Addition of vBulletin blocks in vbDrupal. You get blocks that let you show your latest threads and I believe even whole forums in vbDrupal.

- Ability to show vbDrupal blocks in vBulletin. I haven't tried this yet, but you can have your blocks from vbDrupal go back onto the vBulletin side as well. This means you can have a consistent look and feel on forum pages and non-forum pages.

- Adoption of vBulletin style into vbDrupal. This one I completely missed, but when you install this, it actually lets you use your vBulletin style in vbDrupal. This is a complete departure from the vbDrupal themes, and I've not completely figured this one out yet. You can still select other standard Drupal themes if you want, but you can also have it use your vBulletin style... and I believe you can modify it in vBulletin templates. I need to sort that out, because I am not sure if I want to stay with that or just go with a standard Drupal theme. I think you may give up some things like breadcrumbs over to vBulletin if you don't use the vbDrupal vBulletin style. Bottom line, is that out of the box you can get a site with vbDrupal that looks similar to a vBadvanced type site.

The biggest drawback with any of these approaches is that your content is now split... you can't do a single search of forum and non-forum articles. With GARS, you can. But with vbDrupal, you gain a world of capability because you can build just about anything with it and have to write very little code to do it.

[Clayton]

here is an example of a site 'supposedly' built on vBdrupal

http://www.alltforforaldrar.se/

[mccollin]

Originally Posted by Clayton

here is an example of a site 'supposedly' built on vBdrupal

http://www.alltforforaldrar.se/

Hmm... I don't see a forum on that site at all, so I'd guess its more likely Drupal than vbDrupal. There would be no point if they don't have a forum. I did my best to find a forum, but since I don't speak that langauage I may have missed it.

[Clayton]

yes .. that was why I put 'supposedly'

however I have spoken to the developer and he said he used the 'defaultangy' theme

here is his thread on vbdrupal

http://vbdrupal.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1172

I am working to see if it in fact can be done with the 'defaultangy' theme

on Drupal it mentions using the Zen theme for designing your own theme upon that