Joomla

[shining]

The last days I thougt about leaving vb5 again. Maybe a joomla site with several addons could be THE solution for our needs.
Though the forum has just started in April, we already have nearly 3000 posts...
And maybe vb really doesn´t want to make it easier for developers like Glenn, because even his request http://tracker.vbulletin.com/browse/VBV-17168 is still ignored

Does anyone know if there is a (easy) way to migrate a vbulletin forum to joomla?

[NumNum]

http://gconverters.com/ provide the service. It was refered on TAZ.

[glennrocksvb]

I think William has experience using Joomla. I believe his site was in Joomla before moving to vB5.

[William]

I think William has experience using Joomla. I believe his site was in Joomla before moving to vB5.

Near a decade, and the greatest benefit to stick with Vb 5 is because it is a complete package: cms, articles, blogs, forum, chat, etc.

Joomla: The constant upgrades and maintaining multiple products will ensure your admin constantly deals with web administration issues and no time for content.

Other than that, I really haven't anything negative to say about Joomla because it is an open source free product.

Enjoy,
William

[shining]

Well.. I have never worked with joomla yet... because as a CMS I liked Wordpress more.
But when it comes to a community with different features then joomla is a much better choice.

In the end you have to update every cms so thats no problem for me.

And what I saw right now is that joomla made quite a lot of changes in the last few years. So I gave it a try... because I was sooooo frustrated that vb does not even has a friendlist anymore.

I set up a test site with a (free) community builder (with all features we need) and forum (yes, vbulletin is much better in that) and that worked quite easy so far.

Guess I will ask our members in near future what they think ... and then we have to make a decision whether to keep vbulletin or to change the whole software.

Maybe a miracle happens and vbulletin changes something... (yes, I know that wont happen )

[delicjous]

I work a lot with cms like wordpress, joomla and mostly with drupal. Every of them have its benefits... but if you have a community with lot of (discussion-) content I think you are better with a forum like vB5. I think with the implementation of php-hooks and some other good stuff it goes in a right direction ( even it is to late because there are not enough people like glenn ).

Joomla and wordpress are great for small projects with an minimal skilled administration. It is easy to use and build up some common stuff. But if it come to some forum specials like user permissions it will drive you crazy.
Drupal have very good user permission, a build in Forum and some other really good community stuff (I like it)... but it is very big and have a lot of functionality which a community doesn't need...
But the best thing is to try it by your self.

Even xenforo with the great possibility to have php hooks and great mods are not my favorite (I administrate it for my employer)... vB5 have a really great design and handling which I miss sometime at xenforo. I think it could be great again some time...

What are you exactly missing at vB5? Only the friends list module friends list module? <-- I also think friends module have to be in a forum :-)
If you see friends as both follow the other user ...it could be similar to friends... To list the users who follow as friend (follow/following) and than the followed and following users is not that problem.

[shining]

Yes.. all these were the reasons why I ended up on vb5 But like I said: Sometimes its very frustrating that there are still such a few mods

- Friend List
Yes, adding and having friends is a must have in my opinion. subcriptions are nonsense... users don´t feel the same "subscribing" someone instead of "having a friendship". Thats what todays social media is about and thats the heart of every community.

- Member Search
Looking for friends/interesting people ... a good forum/community needs basic functions like ability to search for other user. Its a shame that vb5 has none of it.

- Profile
I don´t understand why ALL attachements are automatically added to your profile. Even worse: you are not able to hide an album itself. You can show none or all of them to public...

- Gallery
Along with the profile you can add albums/images ... but there is no chance to show them anywhere else like a gallery. So many vb5 customers are looking for a feature like this.

- User Experience = UX
Yes, content is king.. but also the way the content is presented to its users.
So it should be more interactive. Threads/Channels can be so much more than just boring title and text. Why isn´t it possible to add custom fields for further easier informations like in a review for products for example with links, basic details (which are searchable), rating system, and so on.
Also it should be possible for users to have something like a "favorites box"... where they can store all their favorite groups, channels, or so... in order to find them quicker than by looking through hundreds of subscriptions.

- CMS/Modules
There should be a way to do settings to show certain pages or part of it (modules) to selected groups. To block them via CSS is nice but no solution.

- SEO
I would like to say which pages of the CMS should be indexed by search engines and which should be set to noindex.


Sure.. people say its a forum and its only about text content.
But to bind users you have to offer more than that because there are many other forums. So WHY should they stay/register in your forum when they find better ones with all features they are looking for?
Especially when you try to earn some money with your forum (and mostly all have to in order to keep it running), then you need to make it worth a paid membership.

[NumNum]

I miss the integrated gallery as well.

[delicjous]

Oh, that are a lot missing features I never think about... but you are right. Usually every free open source CMS have almost every feature you list here.
Hope you will find the right system.