Interesting article on choosing Drupal forum over vbulletin
Submitted by sepeck on Thu, 2007-10-04 12:53
Now this was interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.
I understand that vbulletin is a popular forum purchased for use on a variety of sites. People using it and another popular open source forum software phpBB often use the 'Drupal forums aren't standard' argument to justify their position.
Neither are standard. They are like Windows. Widely used so people are accustomed to the same look and feel out the box. Not a bad thing, just not a 'Standard'. They are also dedicated to one thing, a feature rich forum rather then a feature rich, flexible CMS.
To achieve a similar setup out of the box with Drupal you have to do a bit more work, add contrib modules, theme appropriately and perhaps a bit of code. Not always the easiest thing depending on what you are trying to achieve. For those who take the effort, I think, the reward of a forum directly integrated into the sites content will out weigh the initial difficulties. You end up with a site that is and looks like yours, not yavbs/yaphpbbs (yet another vbulletin/phpBB site). It has integrated search built right in along with all the other Durpal features.
For those interested in continuing the improvements that have occurred for Drupal 6 for Drupal 7, please help out like minded others on the groups site.
Part 1 on the article can be found here. I am looking forward to Part 2.
note: You can tell they are using Drupal because they forgot to change out the Druplicon favicon. :)
Theme by
All we need is love and Drupal Forum/Bulletin Board profile
All we need is love and Drupal Forum/Bulletin Board profile!
Thanks for the mention
Thank you for your write-up on my article.It's great that this is getting some attention!
To be honest, Drupal's forums are a bit difficult to work with and it's taking some work to get what we want, in particular vBulletin automatically 'upgrades' a user's group when they reach a certain post count. That wasn't easy to replicate, ended up writing some patches for workflow-ng and have a user count/workflow-ng module in the pipeline. But that's what FLOSS is all about right? :)
Am not sure when part 2 of that article will be completed, it'll be a beast, but I was going through the vBulletin Admin Control Panel the other day and there's not a lot there that isn't covered by a contributed module. Overall I'm looking forward to using Drupal for our forums for three reasons:
Ah, you are mistaking laziness for forgetfulness. :) Truth be told, we're looking to completely re-do our theme. Got to replace vBulletin first though!
Oh, I'm called 'jeevesbond' on the Drupal site, we've debated with the same person before (or did you find the article through that thread?)
...
I either found the article on Drupal Planet or Drupal Talk feeds and it's good to tie nicks to people/sites. I really hope that people get involved in the effort to improve forums on the groups site. Some stuff got in for Drupal 6 so it will be nice to get more in for Drupal 7. It's not as far away as some think it is ;)
Strategies on how you implemented it can also give people ideas for areas that could be patched to improve things so definitely give feedback to the groups site. It may end up being a small patch for D7, or something D6 can already do. Also, if you are really nuts, I note that the MAINTAINERS.txt has no dedicated maintainer for forum module. If you do some work on it and submit patches/review attention, then it's not that hard to become a maintainer :).
Many a site has forgotten to replace our favorite water drop.
Best of luck and have fun with it.
I started out with the
I started out with the built-in Drupal forums, even tweaked the templates to make them more visually friendly. But my users just didn't like them, no matter what I did. But honestly I can't imagine why one would go from more functionality(vBulletin) to less(Drupal forums) unless 100% integration was absolutely required.
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