Can VB with proper mods be a community forum with these features?

[slobizman]

I need to put up a community site for a mid-sized town/county. We lack any good online community sites. I don't understand vBulletin enough yet, and while I'm techie enough to with time, do it myself, I want to hire out to create this site--I want it done right and I don't have the time myself. But I have a lot of questions of if I can even got the vBulletiin route, or if I need to go with Drupal or Drupal/vbulletin. (I also know nothing much about Drupal, except after researching CMS's I've narrowed it down to that).

I own many of the domain names for the city/county, such as [city_name].info, [city_name]Blogs.com, [city_name]Forum.com, [city_name]Gallery.com, [city_name]Reviews,com, [city_name]News.com and others. All prime names in need of development.

I do not know if I should make one site under something like [city_name].info with all the things I want together, or separate them out. It really depends upon not only makes makes most sense logically, but what the scripts can do for me, and how they might work together, or if one can do it all. I'm looking to create the following applications:

- user blogs by city/county residents
- forum
- extensive gallery of photos; it's a beautiful county and I'd like to categorize uploaded photos in a hierarchal manner as to pretty much photo document the county.
- reviews (comments) and ratings (compiled by users) of pretty much everything from restaurants, to hotels to hikes, to our huge number of wineries, to churches, to doctors, etc. This is a very important component.
- free Classifieds
- Optional: Info everything, like a wiki sort of (but I hate wikis, and much of this will be part of the above parts, so I may not do it).
- I know I'm missing something else.

You get the idea I think. So, I'm exploring everything, trying to figure out if I should combine it all into one huge site and if so, what is the foundation -- Drupal? VBulletin? Both? Something else? Or, if I should set up mostly separate sites since the scripts for each area I want to cover is so much more sophisticated than the components I can put together in a combo site (for example, vbulletin is more sophisticated than Drupal's forum).

I was really going the route of finding a Drupal developer when I discovered http://www.vblogetin.com/. It make vbulletin an seemingly incredible blog system. It's new, but it seems to work very well. So, I started to research of perhaps vbulletin eith add-on modules can be the basis of much or all of what I'm trying to do. I do not know this yet.

If I went the separate route I could use vbulletin/vblogetin to do a blogging site only, or a blogging site, plus the forum -- [city name]Forum.com or [city name]Blogs.com. I could use a review/rating script for [city name]Reviews.com. I could make a super -sophisticated gallery site with something like Coppermine for SLOGallery.com. Etc, etc, etc....

So, I'm confused as hell! I want to make the best choice to start with.

How much of all this do you think I could do with vBulletin and various modules? Have you seen any community sites such as I am describing done with it? If so, please provide links for me. I do like the idea of the forum as a base, because it is so "tight" with user memberships and privileges. And a forum is so central to a community site.

And, very importantly, I do not want coding mods. I know there is a very minor one to get vblogetin to work with vbadvanced cmps to work together, and I'd have to accept that for something so important. But I've been through owning a forum that had coding hacks all over the place and upgrades were a nightmare. Plugins (or add-ons or whatever they are called here) are fine if I just "plug them in".

So, in conclusion, 1) how much of what I mentioned above do you think a vbulletin platform with modules can do? 2) looking for recommendations on vbulletin experts that can piece together the components and design the template for either a blog using vBlogetin or a blog/forum?, or more, or the whole darn wish list.

[Caerydd]

I would suggest both. I use vbulletin (plus some minor hacks - welcome headers, quick account switch, vbspell, support forums, latest paid subscribers and so on) and vbDrupal - http://www.vbdrupal.org. I was going to click 'install' for vbdrupal here, but for some reason I can't access the link in Tamarain's signature.

Anyway, a hell of a lot of drupal modules will work with vbdrupal, as well as the themes. If you want the vb look, it takes on the vbulletin templates pretty seemlessly, provides blogs, stories...etc etc.

My site is a bit sketchy right now: http://www.alleria.com but we have over a 1000 pages of content, and our user base is huge. We recently upgraded to 4.7.4.3 vbDrupal and 3.6.4 of vBulletin, so I have a lot of work to do to get it running seemlessly again - but its power, with things like views and actions modules, and ...cck and everything else just makes any other CMS addon look ridiculous.

And the best part? the forums themselves stay nice and safe

[SaintDog]

One thing to keep in mind with this project, however, is the fact that vBulletin can only be installed on a single domain. This means specifically, if you're going to create separate websites for the forum, blogging system, daily news, classifieds, ect and plan to use vBulletin addon's and plugins to present these, you will require a separate vBulletin license for each domain.

If you do not have an overly large budget, I would figure out a way to present all the information through the single domain and simply provide links to each .

[MoniK]

Originally Posted by SaintDog

One thing to keep in mind with this project, however, is the fact that vBulletin can only be installed on a single domain. This means specifically, if you're going to create separate websites for the forum, blogging system, daily news, classifieds, ect and plan to use vBulletin addon's and plugins to present these, you will require a separate vBulletin license for each domain.

Sorry, I dont' think so - with one licence you could install the forum on one physical place on one domain - but several other domains or subdomains could be routed to this one physical installation an refer it

Only if you have more than one forum installed, you need additional licences.

Und in my opinion is the combination with drupal and vbulletin the best solution for your project. With vb you could organize categories and forums for your region and with drupal you have a great pool of modules to extend this cms system like classifieds, reviews, blogs per user and so on.

Would be nice to hear later more on this project (I'm running a regional info site in germany, too )

Greets, Monika

[SaintDog]

Last I recall (and from previous instances) you can install one instance per domain, if you require additional instances of the software, you require additional licenses (as per the license agreement).

If the software is setup to appear as if you are running multiple instances, that qualifies for such and you would need multiple licenses.

If you setup vBulletin on a single domain with a single instance and then install the blogging system to blog.domain.com, that would not require an additional license, however use of multiple domains would require an additional license. For instance, if you used domain.com and simply redirected blogdomain.com to domain.com.

There have been quite a few questions regarding the license at the vBulletin support forums and elsewhere and the answer has been the same.

If in question, it would be best to contact Jelsoft directly.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

You can power a single instance of vBulletin with a license. You can point multiple domains to the same board, as long as they show the same content, and you do not try to make it seem like multiple boards depending on the url it is used on.