By pcoskat on

I'm a die hard vBulletin user, just getting 'hip' to the magic of Drupal.

I saw that there is vBulletin integration ability. Has anyone done this? How did it work for you?

Thanks for any comments, or links to examples!

Comments

rszrama’s picture

rszrama commented

Hey, as the "maintainer" of the drupal vb module here, I'll let ya know that the current CVS version (for Drupal 4.7) is still a little buggy. There's been a patch posted to the issue tracker that I just haven't had the chance to download and review. Maybe I can get to it this evening, but if this is something you're looking at for the near future you might try something else. ; ) Not to say I wouldn't want the module to work... it actually did when I was doing local testing, but something about my environment besides the code was making it work at the time! Now I've moved onto another project at work and have to fix this in my spare time some day...

Another option is the full integration of Drupal with vB at http://www.vbdrupal.org. It may not be what you're looking for, but it's worth a shot. From what I understand, it's recently been updated for 4.7.

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Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org

pcoskat’s picture

pcoskat commented

Hi Rszrama -

Thank you for responding!

I will take a look at vBDrupal, and I 'really' want to continue using vB (I'm most familiar with it, and don't know about the admin power of the core Drupal forum.)

Plus my current vB forum has 36,000 members, and they won't take kindly to a 'switch'. :)

rszrama’s picture

rszrama commented

I gotcha. Well, vbdrupal may not be for you, then. ; ) I'm not sure what features exist there for existing forums w/ existing userbases. I think someone along the issue tracker for my module was planning on writing the code to integrate an existing vB user table w/ a Drupal user table, but I can't remember...

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Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org

pcoskat’s picture

pcoskat commented

Oh no, that's disappointing. I didn't realize I had to start with a fresh vB install.

Hmmm, must do some thinking...

elmwood’s picture

elmwood commented

I run vbDrupal on my site, which includes a long-established vBulletin-based message board, and the integration was nearly flawless. The only problem I'm having is upgrading from 4.6 to 4.7, because the Drupal template I'm using doesn't work with 4.7.

Yura Filimonov’s picture

Yura Filimonov commented

Are there any serious drawback with using the Drupal forum instead of vBulletin?

For instance:
- can I use a Drupal theme for vBulletin, if I integrate them?
- are there any duplicate content issues with Drupal?

I'd rather prefer to have a Drupal forum and use one theme for the site, but not sure, if Drupal forum requires more resources and will allow integrating more features (like in the vBulletin forum).

Any comments are welcome.

Thanks.

vm’s picture

vm commented

what you get with a drupal forum out of the box, is what you see used here on drupal.org

My experience is this, if you already have an established forum community, many will dislike the shift from vbulletin to a drupal forum. mainly because they've grown content with where things are and how things work. I've found this change is always difficult for the users and their expectations of how the forum should or shouldnt work.

Expectations of your user base will be the hardest hurdle to overcome.

Yura Filimonov’s picture

Yura Filimonov commented

I don't have an established website, but I want to use Drupal to setup a blog, a directory, a shop and a forum. So I'd rather indeed use the Drupal forum, if it had the functionality for the site to be on the same theme.

From what I see here, I'll need a couple of more features, such as pagination, latest post, etc.

However, I'd like to place the latest threads on my homepage - and also the most popular threads, not sure if I can do this, if I integrate vBulletin with Drupal.

Is there a completely working integration of vBulletin and Drupal, or something?
I've heard that vbdrupal.org works, but not sure if there any restrictions.

Thanks for the response.

Success’s picture

Success commented

If my sites are all in a multi-site configuration, can I install individual vbulletin for each site?

Southpaw’s picture

Southpaw commented

Yes you can, but you'd need multiple vB licenses.

I had a vB community but decided to go with the drupal forums for a variety of reasons. The biggest problem I found was that there was no integrated search and that there was no complete user integration. (That and it's now free for me to upgrade if in the future the drupal forums decides to take a turn for the better).

I found that the best way to convert from my original board was to convert everything using the vb -> phpbb converter, and then importing everything into Drupal.

The simple [bbcode] module made most of my users happy.

I don't regret converting from vB at all in retrospect.

Hope that helps you out.

Success’s picture

Success commented

I don't understand.

If multi sites are done by domain pointing, will installing vbulletin on domain.com/forums/ cause conflict?

Southpaw’s picture

Southpaw commented

You can set up multisites using another directory/subdirectory. Ex. you can set up vB on sub.domain.com/forums as well as domain.com/forums

Success’s picture

Success commented

How do you set up domain.com/vbulletin?

Do you use park domains or other method?

Do you do it thru cpanel or WHM?

Because I set up a domain as a multisite by parking it on top of another domain and I was unable to access my forums directory.

I also tried to created a subdirectory in drupal's /sites/domain.com/forums/

It shows a drupal page with the error "Page not found"

rsteiner125’s picture

rsteiner125 commented

Whoa! I've been looking around the forums and I have yet to see a suggestion to completely convert vBulletin over to drupal. Far out. phpBB converter aye? I'll have to look into that. Still sounds dangerous though.

R.J. Steinert
Level Sky Designs
http://www.Levelsky.com

general need’s picture

general need commented

Hello, I have a phpBB database and would like to import into Drupal, thus establishing Drupal user accounts and maintaining previous forum statistics etc.

Are you saying that this is possible?

WeRockYourWeb.com’s picture

WeRockYourWeb.com commented

Hi there,

Importing phpBB into Drupal is possible in the sense that you contain a phpbb installation within Drupal, and integrate various features such as registration, profiles, avatars, etc. Check out our article Integrating phpBB with Drupal for more info.

Cheers,
Alex
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Contract Web Development, Inc.

WeRockYourWeb.com’s picture

WeRockYourWeb.com commented

As a sidenote, we've been trying to decide whether to use native Drupal forums or phpBB within our community site. The advantage with native Drupal forums is that they work with clean URL's and are SEF (Search Engine Friendly) out of the box. However, phpBB forums are more feature rich and probably more efficient resource wise, but I'm not certain. What's holding us back from using phpBB is that the integration with Drupal is not 100%. We've tried iframe approaches, but then you need to "bust" certain links out of the frame to avoid the "site within a site" issue, and we're currently playing with "wrapping" a static version of our Drupal theme around the phpBB installation. The drawback being that Drupal admin functionality is lost once we're within the forums. Bottom line I would install native Drupal forums if starting fresh, but if you already have a large phpBB database, I would consider integrating instead of starting over.

Alex
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Contract Web Development, Inc.

rszrama’s picture

rszrama commented

I'm not sure what you'd think of them, but I've managed to get a fairly standard forum look and feel at Ubercart.org. We're using the default forum module with a host of contributed modules and some theming to make it.

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Drupal by Wombats | Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org