Administrative and Maintenance Tools - [ForumOps] vBulletin Development Environment

vBulletin Development Environment

vBulletin Development Environment (VDE) is a tool that allows you to build vBulletin products entirely from the filesystem. By using the filesystem, it allows you to follow best practises such as using version control, and simply working on actual files. Having to switch between browser windows and copy/paste is extremely inefficient.

This product has been updated to work with with vBulletin 3.5 and up to the latest 4.x series.

Runtime Environment

Assuming all of your files are in place, VDE checks your ./projects directory on every page load, and injects all of your projects' templates, plugins, etc. into memory and runs them as if they were natively installed into vBulletin.

Product Builder

VDE also comes with a project builder, which allows you to export your project into a standard product XML, and also any associated files with your project.

Open Source

This product is open source, and I encourage everyone who uses it to contribute back via GitHub.

Installation Instructions

Short version: upload files, import product XML. There are slightly different instructions based on whether or not you are running vBulletin 3 or 4.

Full instructions can be found at:
https://github.com/ForumOps/vBulleti...nt-Environment

I will not be posting any change logs or detailed instructions here, because they may change heavily with each version. Please refer to the GitHub page.

Disclaimer: this product was originally developed by SirAdrian / Adrian Schneider, who is part of our staff, and the primary maintainer of the product still.

[Adrian Schneider]

I'm just using VDE + ATC right now, didn't have to modify much to get it working.

For ATC, change the (only) plugin to global_bootstrap_complete, and global $vbulletin as a quick fix. All the configuration is in the plugin. That should give you enough to go off of. Other than that, I'm not sure what you mean by a "test account".

I do plan on adding that functionality to VDE though, but like I said above, it's probably several weeks away due to my workload at the moment. I'll do it in pieces as I need different functionality.

Cheers

[Jeff Ledger]

A test account means I thought you were developing and testing on somewhere in a test board.

Thank you for these informations, I will test them soon and see if I can give you any suggestions or feedbacks.

Honestly, I never tried the Automatic Template Compiler before but I will definitely give it a try.

Jeff

[Plugin Pete]

Adrian and Co... this looks like a fantastic tool, and I wish I'd had it when I started porting my latest project from WordPress to vBulletin. I'm going to spend the time now to move my project into your environment for ongoing development.

Thanks, and keep up the great work!

[Adrian Schneider]

Hey Guys,

We've been working with ATC+VDE on the past few projects and were able to make some big fixes/changes to ATC. I'm going to start combining the two shortly.

For now, Jeff, feel free to PM me if you want the updated ATC code that works.

[Adrian Schneider]

I should have a combined product released in a few days here. Anyone want to help test it later this week?

Thanks

[Adrian Schneider]

If anyone wants to help look at the new updates, check them out on my fork.

New features:
-Merged ATC into VDE
-Scripts: generate posts, generate forums, export templates (from db to fs)

Will get merged in the next few days into the official repo.

[Birched]

Does anyone who uses the Template Modification System have experience trying to use it and VDE on the same install? Do they play nicely together?

[merk_aus]

I believe that it was a port of an old mod for me to vb4 that adrian talked about on msn - a port that would usually take 30 hours took just a handful and that is why I have always supported adrian.

He gave me a 2 week estimate and the next day I received an e-mail saying here it is let me know if there are any issues.

I too would be interested to see if there was anyone who had created a project using this that they are ready to release.

[datoneer]

Thank you awesome mod

[Adrian Schneider]

I've pushed a ton of updates...

The latest version does support style / template development, though the documentation is probably only 80% there.

Let me know if any of you are still using this stuff and I'll spend more time on the docs!

Cheers