vBulletin to Drupal?

I would also like to convert from vbulletin 3.6.4 to drupal 5.1.
Is it not possible to do it manually. How much money would it cost if a coder would do the transfer?
Our message board has about 10 000 threads & 200 000 posts.

Thanks

Just curious ... why?

Quint commented 19 May 2007 at 17:38

If you've already got 200,000 posts in vBulletin, why would you want to switch? (Just curious.)

I have set up forums in YABB and PHPBB, and finally gave up on the "free but tons of work" route, and switched to vBulletin. It's not free, but works great 'right out of the box', and save me tons of time, and has all the features I want.

I now have a new forum site I need to set up, and I'm trying to find a reason to do it in Drupal. VBull is a fantastic forum, but it's the same old story ... open source is great in that if you want to set up a new site (or ten new sites) -- you just set it up -- but in retrospect, if the forum is a success, I'd wish I had paid the cash, and set up vBulletin instead.

So, I'm curious why at this point, you'd want to switch. It might give me a good reason to set up the new forum-centric site in Drupal.

Quint

Why vBulletin Sucks

Liam McDermott commented 12 July 2007 at 18:28

If you've already got 200,000 posts in vBulletin, why would you want to switch? (Just curious.)

We have about the same number and are looking to do the same thing. We have grown to despise vBulletin for the following reasons:

Too many features. There's just too much going on. Users are mostly blind to all the things possible (buddy lists and all that rubbish), as it's impossible to see the wood for the trees. Quality is secondary to quantity in vBulletin so not much is implemented very well. This also makes the admin interface a kludgy mess that's difficult to navigate.
Difficult to theme. We like using Web standards, CSS and table-less layouts. vBulletin is a mess of nested tables and other crap HTML code.
We tried fixing the templates and ended up with an upgrade nightmare. This is because vBulletin is not written very well. They should have used the MVC (model-view-controller) method, instead they've mixed lots of code--that should be in the logic controller--into the templates.
There seem to be a lot more security problems in vBulletin than Drupal. This in my opinion has a lot to do with the way it's written. Every security release brings another raft of random changes to the templates too, making it difficult to upgrade.
vBulletin == old-school proprietary. Typical of proprietary software, vBulletin packs in the features so you get the immediate impression that it's powerful. It has so much crap you don't need (but think you do, or might do in the future) that it gives the impression of being impossible to replace. Do most sites really need a BBCode editor, AJAX for posting, Buddy lists, User reputations, Infractions, Podcasts (frickin' podcasts!)? No, they don't. Having a million-and-one features is not what draws people to sites, it doesn't bring them back, nor will they even notice if those features are missing! Yes, many sites do need these features, but what all sites must have is a well written product, feature creep has stopped vBulletin from being that in my opinion.
Drupal == new-school Free sofware. Modular and well written, the base Drupal installation follows the mantra: 'do one thing and do it well,' (weren't those the words of Linus T.?) If your site is aimed at non-technical people then you can get a WYSIWYG editor module, if you're really community-orientated get one of the many voting modules. The point is to install only what's needed, this keeps Drupal development from being stymied by feature-creep and makes it run faster. It also gives module developers plenty of work and provides a 'module meritocracy' where only the best modules are kept updated. This contrasts the stale vBulletin development model, where creating a better forum platform is crushed beneath the weight of a million features hardly anyone uses, but everyone must have installed. In short: Drupal is modular, vBulletin a monolith.

open source is great in that if you want to set up a new site (or ten new sites) -- you just set it up -- but in retrospect, if the forum is a success, I'd wish I had paid the cash, and set up vBulletin instead.

Whereas I think exactly the opposite. My experience with 'open source' has been that it's a hassle to setup (because you have to know exactly what you want and how everything works), but once it's setup it just runs and runs. Proprietary software--again this is just my experience--is easy to setup and use initially, but always falls short of what I want it to do and/or is difficult to maintain.

It's also the strengths and weaknesses of two different development models showing through. In my world Free software nearly always wins, that may not be the case in yours. Also, please don't think am being mean to you in this post. I'm being mean to vBulletin: there's a big difference. :)

---

Web Design, GNU/Linux and Drupal.

A user's vote for vBulletin over Drupal

mikeschinkel commented 8 August 2007 at 05:26

JMTCW, but as a user of a forum I'd far prefer to use vBulletin over Drupal. vBulletin may have lots of features, but Drupal's forums currently have far too few. If you want a forum that is open-source, go with something like SMF or phpBB over Drupal. I know there are those here on the Drupal forum that my statement will infuriate, but your users will thank you for it...

(BTW, if you have 200k users and switch from vBulletin to Drupal's forum, you have no idea how much outrageous you will be about to experience...)

Yep

Quint commented 8 August 2007 at 12:55

Absolutely.

vBulletin may have lots of

Liam McDermott commented 9 August 2007 at 19:41

vBulletin may have lots of features, but Drupal's forums currently have far too few.

Like what? Am just not finding this to be the case.

(BTW, if you have 200k users and switch from vBulletin to Drupal's forum, you have no idea how much outrageous you will be about to experience...)

We'll just see about that shall we? I'll post just how much 'outrage' we get from our forum users here. :)

---
Web Design, GNU/Linux and Drupal.

Don't say I didn't warn you...

mikeschinkel commented 12 August 2007 at 08:17

@jeevesbond: Like what? Am just not finding this to be the case.

Hundreds. But how about we start with five:

1.) lack of email notifications
2.) inability to see more than the just the last comment when replying.
3.) inability to edit initial post, even seconds after it is posted.
4.) frequent double-posting errors not caught by Drupal.
5.) performance of Drupal forums pale compared to vBulletin.

There are many, many others, too numerous for me to track down. But those five are the ones I notice most frustratingly often when posting on Drupal.org.

@jeevesbond: We'll just see about that shall we? I'll post just how much 'outrage' we get from our forum users here. :)

When you switch, make sure you are also prepared to switch back if the outrage is too great. And I do expect you to be honest with us in your reporting of the outrage. :)

Just don't say I didn't warn you...

=-=

VM commented 12 August 2007 at 14:03

1) notify module or comment module fixes this
2) never heard anyone complain about this before
3) forumaccess.module allows editing permisison and fixes this
4) there is a module that controls this also, I beieve its called dblclick
5) never used Vbulletin myself so I don't know but on the sites I have that use Vbullietin I find the conversations wind up taking place on nodes rather then in the forums.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
give a person a fish and you feed them for a day but ... teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime

>> 1) notify module or

mikeschinkel commented 14 August 2007 at 00:38

>> 1) notify module or comment module fixes this
>> 3) forumaccess.module allows editing permisison and fixes this
>> 4) there is a module that controls this also, I beieve its called dblclick

Why are these not installed on drupal.org, then?

>> 5) never used Vbulletin myself so I don't know but on the sites I have that use Vbullietin I find the conversations wind up taking place on nodes rather then in the forums.

I always find it odd when people champion something as superior/inferior when they've never actually experienced the alternate.

>> 2) never heard anyone complain about this before

If you had used vBulletin, you would sorely miss it on Drupal. As least I do.

...

sepeck commented 15 August 2007 at 23:38

1. we're busy.
3. Because we don't want people editing their initial post.
4. double posting is a result of massive growth. We, until like a week ago are running this site off one database server. A lot of work is ongoing to expand that such as proxy, slave database, etc. Frankly with the current volunteer workload, there isn't time to review and test yet another module to put on drupal.org

5. Your needs are not my needs. Frankly I like the simplicity of these forums and find others annoying but that is a perspective that is dependant on YOUR sites needs and objectives. What is superior/inferior to you may not be for me. Don't smack down people trying to help you.

2) This is open source, not a $$ pay for product. In order to garner improvements, people have to contribute code, testing and docs. If you want improvements, then please join with those with similar goals and help them. http://groups.drupal.org/drubb

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

That's a very "me, me, me-centric" attitude, isn't it?

mikeschinkel commented 18 August 2007 at 19:02

1. we're busy.
3. Because we don't want people editing their initial post.
5. Your needs are not my needs.

That's a very "me, me, me-centric" attitude, isn't it?

As for #1 there could easily be an option to turn off notication, as does vBulletin. One of the many reasons vBulletin is better; you don't have to battle attitude.

As for #3, the use case where it is important is immediately upon posting when the poster sees a typo. Software that is better designed than Drupal's allows for editing of posts within 15 minutes of posting to resolve that issue.

As for #5, that is exactly the type of comment I hear from people (myself included) when the say they don't use Drupal because of the attitude of the people on the Drupal forum. Many people use Joomla et. al. instead of Drupal because of the attitude found here. Congratulate yourself, you are doing a good job of running people off. :-(

4. double posting is a result of massive growth. We, until like a week ago are running this site off one database server. A lot of work is ongoing to expand that such as proxy, slave database, etc. Frankly with the current volunteer workload, there isn't time to review and test yet another module to put on drupal.org

No, double posting is a result of poor software design. It takes little effort to validate a post to see that it is a duplicate of one that was previously posted.

Frankly I like the simplicity of these forums and find others annoying but that is a perspective that is dependant on YOUR sites needs and objectives.

And that's why Drupal.org is a pain for many people like me to us, and why Drupal forums module is not a viable solution for most use-cases.

What is superior/inferior to you may not be for me. Don't smack down people trying to help you.

Huh? You clearly didn't read my post. The "superior/inferior" comment was me commenting on other people's implied use of "superior/inferior." I was saying that other people champion software as superior when they've not used the alternative.

And this is not a "trying to help me" discussion, it's a debate over the relative merits of vBulletin when compared with Drupal forums. I find Drupal forums lacking and when people challenged me as to why I explained.

2) This is open source, not a $$ pay for product. In order to garner improvements, people have to contribute code, testing and docs. If you want improvements, then please join with those with similar goals and help them.

You are sounding like a broken record from prior threads. I'm never asked for improvements in Drupal. When I want an improvement I write it myself, and I will be contributing modules to the community when they are general purpose enough.

In this case I was championing vBulletin over Drupal forums and supporting Quints assertion that it is a bad idea to move from vBulletin for 200,000 members to a Drupal forum. This seems to be a hot-button for you, as I guess it is for me but we are on different sides of the fence. However, be clear for future threads, I am not asking the community to do anything related to forums as I think it is a lost cause. I am instead advocating that people use vBulletin instead. And when and if I get a chance, I will write an integration for the two, or use someone else's if one comes along and is good enough.

So please stop saying "This is open source, don't ask for improvements, blah blah blah." When you do so you are completely mischaracterize my comments.

...

sepeck commented 18 August 2007 at 22:19

#1 The modules have overhead that would add to the load on a infrastructure already near capacity. While we are working on changing that, that work takes time and money. We have limited unpaid volunteer resources that have the skills and experience to deal with sites the size of drupal.org and frankly it's a lot of work. You seem to flatly dismiss the amount of work involved which indicates you don't understand.
#3 there are modules for this. We choose not to use them on drupal.org.
#5 shrug. I and others have answered your questions, directed you to solutions and pointed you at strategies to do for yourself. Your accusations are an attempt at emotional blackmail to make me and others do as you want.

#4 you choose not to believe me. I can't help that. Supply a patch in the issue queue otherwise. (you are not going to like that response at all are you?)

You think Drupal would benefit from a more feature rich core forum module? Then you can add the contributed modules mentioned previously. You can contribute to improving drupal's core forum module. Dries accepts patches for this kind of stuff from contributors all the time, it's how Drupal core improves. Several are going in for Drupal 6 in fact. You don't seem to like that answer so accuse us of being unfriendly. If vBulletin works for you then fine, using it you lose out on the benefits of integrated content in a CMS which may be perfectly acceptable to your needs.

#2 So my disagreeing with you and suggesting you join with others to improve things is a bad thing to say? Ok I guess.

I do not believe I am is mis-characterizing your comments so I guess we can disagree on that as you certainly are mis-characterizing mine. I believe I said...

In order to garner improvements, people have to contribute code, testing and docs. If you want improvements, then please join with those with similar goals and help them.

Evidently at the end of this entire thread, your answer is, you don't want to help improve Drupal's forums but may contribute something when you feel you have something that interests you and isn't something specific to your own sites.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

1.) lack of email

Liam McDermott commented 12 August 2007 at 19:39

1.) lack of email notifications

You couldn't have picked a better reason, our users are asking for RSS feeds instead of e-mail notifications: http://www.webmaster-forums.net/showthread.php?t=38880 CommentRSSwill do this for us. :)

2.) inability to see more than the just the last comment when replying.

Only if the comment reply form is on a seperate page, there's a setting where it can be added to the bottom of the comments.

3.) inability to edit initial post, even seconds after it is posted.

Just tested, this works fine for me. Must be the way drupal.org is setup. Can see why it would be annoying though!

4.) frequent double-posting errors not caught by Drupal.

Think this is fixed in Drupal 6 and as Very Misunderstood pointed out: there's a module that provides this functionality available now.

5.) performance of Drupal forums pale compared to vBulletin.

I'd be inclined to agree with this for the front page, in-thread the performance of Drupal is better though in my opinion: pages take less time to download because they aren't full of nested tables and other junk. Performance of the front page can be improved by caching too.

One thing that was going to be a problem for us is automatic role upgrading (giving access to new forums based upon post counts etc.), however I've patched workflow-ng to do this, and written a new module to provide number of days since user registration and post count tokens (will release this when it's stable and tested!). The great thing about Free software: I can modify, give back to the community and we all benefit. That doesn't really happen with vBulletin. In particular some of the licenses on vBulletin.org: you can use but not modify this code, how do I improve upon it then? How do I make it do what I need?

And I do expect you to be honest with us in your reporting of the outrage. :)

Certainly! We will be doing a 'public beta' at some point in the near future, I will provide a link to the thread with user reactions.

=-=

VM commented 12 August 2007 at 21:36

One of the biggest reasons to use Drupal Forums over an integrated forum is simply search. Otherwise you have two searches users should use. I state this full well knowing many users don't search ever : )
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
give a person a fish and you feed them for a day but ... teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime

You couldn't have picked a

mikeschinkel commented 14 August 2007 at 00:51

You couldn't have picked a better reason, our users are asking for RSS feeds instead of e-mail notifications: http://www.webmaster-forums.net/showthread.php?t=38880 CommentRSSwill do this for us. :)

I don't follow. I didn't ask for RSS, I asked for email notification. And importantly, on Drupal.org in addition to custom sites.

Only if the comment reply form is on a seperate page, there's a setting where it can be added to the bottom of the comments.

Can you please convince Drupal.org to turn on that feature?

Just tested, this works fine for me. Must be the way drupal.org is setup. Can see why it would be annoying though!

You tested it to work on Drupal.org, or your own custom sites?

Think this is fixed in Drupal 6

It's fixed in shipping version of vBulletin, and have been for years.

and as Very Misunderstood pointed out: there's a module that provides this functionality available now.

Can you please convince Drupal.org to add that module?!? Drupal.org is the canonical site for Drupal; if it can't do it then it's a bad showcase for forum functionality. Personally I'd rather use vBulletin where it all works than have to cobble together something 1/2 as good in Drupal.

OTOH, I'd rather use Drupal for a CMS than vBAdvanced...

I'd be inclined to agree with this for the front page, in-thread the performance of Drupal is better though in my opinion: pages take less time to download because they aren't full of nested tables and other junk. Performance of the front page can be improved by caching too.

I rarely use a vBulletin site that is not nearly instantaneous. And I rarely use a Drupal site that is performant. The latter is fatiguing to the user and minimizes the amount of time they will participate.

One thing that was going to be a problem for us is automatic role upgrading (giving access to new forums based upon post counts etc.), however I've patched workflow-ng to do this, and written a new module to provide number of days since user registration and post count tokens (will release this when it's stable and tested!).

Sorry, I don't follow that.

The great thing about Free software: I can modify, give back to the community and we all benefit. That doesn't really happen with vBulletin. In particular some of the licenses on vBulletin.org: you can use but not modify this code, how do I improve upon it then? How do I make it do what I need?

Sure, but I'm not a "one issue voter." I consider many aspects and commercial software is not a deal killer for me. vBulletin has a plug-in capability that allows for the community to contribute if they so desire. The point is, nothing is perfect. Acting as if it is doesn't make it so.

Certainly! We will be doing a 'public beta' at some point in the near future, I will provide a link to the thread with user reactions.

I'm actuallly very anxious to see the reactions. Everything I know about the web and sociology tells me that you are in for a firestorm as people don't like change, especially if it is regressive, but I could be wrong. There is nothing like actually testing the waters to find out for sure. If I'm wrong, I'll offer my mea-cupla (about the firestorm, not about my preference for vBulletin. :)

BTW, which version of vBulletin are you on? If not >=3.0, then the outrage may be less.

=-=

VM commented 15 August 2007 at 21:48

convincing Drupal.org to add modules isn't as much the issue as justifying the overhead modules cause, can you imagine with over 100,000 users how much email would be generated from this site alone ? let alone groups.drupal.org, and the issue query, where subscriptions are turned on. There is a new subscriptions module being worked on by one of the developers of drupal core, maybe then will it make it into core. Until such time I suggest using your tracker, thats what its there for.

There is a group on groups.drupal.org where they are working on a better (subjective) forum.module. DruBB, however, there are only a few people taking up the actual task of working toward a new forum module. There are far more individuals wanting one, than working on one. Drupal did not set out to become the another OS forum software and I personally don't see the forum.module taking focus on the CMS/CMF it's becoming, unless a group of people actually begin working on code for it and submitting patches for testing.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
give a person a fish and you feed them for a day but ... teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime

convincing Drupal.org to

mikeschinkel commented 18 August 2007 at 19:19

convincing Drupal.org to add modules isn't as much the issue as justifying the overhead modules cause, can you imagine with over 100,000 users how much email would be generated from this site alone ?

Quoting 100k users is a misnomer. Email would only need be generated on subscribed threads, and when you look at the reality of traffic typically only people who have commented on a thread are subscribed. It ends up being a much much smaller number of emails than you imply. And if implemented like vBulletin, it would only send one for the first post to a thread since last visit; that way a very active thread doesn't produce must more email than a marginally active thread.

Another approach for email notifications could also be federation.

It is not let alone groups.drupal.org, and the issue query, where subscriptions are turned on. There is a new subscriptions module being worked on by one of the developers of drupal core, maybe then will it make it into core. Until such time I suggest using your tracker, thats what its there for.

Tracker can send me email notifications when someone posts to a thread I'm participating in? How do I configure that?

There is a group on groups.drupal.org where they are working on a better (subjective) forum.module. DruBB, however, there are only a few people taking up the actual task of working toward a new forum module. There are far more individuals wanting one, than working on one. Drupal did not set out to become the another OS forum software and I personally don't see the forum.module taking focus on the CMS/CMF it's becoming, unless a group of people actually begin working on code for it and submitting patches for testing.

My personal opinion is that Drupal is probably the best CMS. But it is not a great forum, vBulletin is. Trying to be both a great CMS and a great forum will probably make it neither. I don't advocate to do anything with Drupal forums, I'd rather see an integration with other forum software (except a few improvements to the forums module like email notifications would be nice since Drupal.org is unlikely to use other forum software.)

Actually, what I'd really like to see is an REST-based integration standard developed so that all CMS and all forums and all blogs and all wikis etc could interoperate. If there was a will to work on that, I would definitely contribute.

=-=

VM commented 18 August 2007 at 22:14

Quoting 100k users is a misnomer.

I disagree, I've seen many many threads, where people add a comment, simply to add the thread to their tracker and follow it. The stating of 100,000 users was simply to give a #, if 10,000 of those are subscribed to 20 threads, the email generated is hardly over stated. Though I suppose we can agree to disagree on this. I tend to, and prefer to use my tracker every time I come to Drupal.org to follow up on threads I've started or commented in & would continue to do so even if a subscription process was in place, as I don't really need to spend any more time sorting through email. Between my issue query subscriptions and contact page email, I get enough : )

Tracker can send me email notifications when someone posts to a thread I'm participating in? How do I configure that?

erm, tracker ? I stated, issue query, which can be subscribed to by using the subscribe link at the top of the issue area. Where you can subscribe to ONLY your issues, or ALL of a specific projects issues. see: http://drupal.org/project/issues

Theorhetically, this is where support issues for specific modules should go. So that those who are subscribed are notified and can give module specific help.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
give a person a fish and you feed them for a day but ... teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime

I am on vBulletin 3 point

Liam McDermott commented 4 October 2007 at 06:31

I am on vBulletin 3 point something-or-other. I'm sorry for not responding to your posts earlier, but really I can't be expected to persuade the Drupal maintainers to change their forum setup just to win an argument with you. As the conversation with Sepeck shows, they aren't willing to budge. I also happen to know they've got more important things on their plate, they've just finished a major hardware upgrade. :)

Drupal can be an excellent forum platform, but it does require work. I am choosing to be a bit pioneering and am going to do that work myself, the payoff is hopefully a one-up on the competition, who mostly use vBulletin.

I've written a comprehensive article on the problems we faced with vBulletin and why we're moving off the platform, I also posted a thread about it on the vBulletin forums. Some members of the community actually agreed with the concerns raised and one of their devs posted, but certainly didn't contradict most of my points.

The second article in that series will be how to convert over from vBulletin, it will include a functionality comparison list showing how to duplicate the important functionality of vBulletin in Drupal. Hopefully that will be enough to pursuade the nay-sayers. :)

ANOTHER THING thing I dislike about Drupal forums...

mikeschinkel commented 14 August 2007 at 00:53

Oh, I just remembered another thing I really dislike about Drupal forums. It is very hard to be sure you've seen all the new comments on a post. In vBulletin, it's obivous.

It is very hard to be sure

Liam McDermott commented 4 October 2007 at 06:34

It is very hard to be sure you've seen all the new comments on a post.

Again, that's a configuration issue. Threaded mode Vs. Linear mode (Drupal does both and threaded mode far better than vBulletin does). They both have their advantages, in threaded mode it's harder to see what's new, but many conversations can happen at once. Personally I like threaded mode, maybe there could be some improvement where all old posts were temporarily grayed out, or all new posts shown at the top of the thread.

theme

sepeck commented 4 October 2007 at 19:17

Unread comments have a flag for a logged on user. In drupal.org's case, there is a class 'new' associated with them so it is something that could be themed.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

In drupal.org's case, there

Liam McDermott commented 8 October 2007 at 07:33

In drupal.org's case, there is a class 'new' associated with them so it is something that could be themed.

The only problem I had with this (in the Garland theme anyway), all the new links are given an id of 'new' which makes the html invalid. Although it's the only way of making the browser navigate to the first new post in the thread. I did have a pretty good think about the problem and couldn't come up with a better solution, apart from greying out the posts somehow.

Oh well, that's got nothing to do with the OP's post, but it is a minor concern. Anyway, it still is easier to see posts in linear mode because, well, that's the whole point of linear mode! In threaded mode new posts could anywhere on the page, in linear it's easier to see where they are.

It's a silly thing to complain about though, these are the drupal.org forums, just because they're setup a particular way doesn't mean all forums powered by Drupal have to be: that's the strength of this software, versatility! :)

---
Web Design, GNU/Linux and Drupal.

For anyone who needs

Liam McDermott commented 23 July 2007 at 20:49

For anyone who needs vBulletin to be converted to Drupal I'm starting a project to write a converter. Have a look at: http://drupal.org/node/161516 for details.

---
Web Design, GNU/Linux and Drupal.

Simple php forum

Gone-1 commented 24 July 2007 at 12:57

If you want a simple free php XHTML/CSS valid forum, try www.punbb.org. Personally I don't use as I think features are important but a few forums I am a member on do and it's really fast.

Subscribing

dnewkerk commented 21 August 2007 at 02:09

Subscribing

-- Dave

I am dissapointed...

Glorifindel commented 5 October 2007 at 14:00

I apologize for the length of this post. I had a lot to say.

I have been looking seriously at Drupal as the foundation of a new site I am creating. One of my issues with Drupal is that the forums are VERY rudimentary. That makes it much less of a contender for my choice as a platform for my new site. Many sites rely heavily on forums as a means to provide a vibrant communications mechanism for their community. I am surprised that this is lost on the good people here at drupal.org since this site is forum dependent itself.

When you are saddled with very basic forums on such a site it creates several issues that come at you. Many of your users that have had experiences with more full-featured forums will ask why they do not have the same features on your site. This in itself generates a significant workload for the site maintainers as well as creating difficult customer service problems. Look at the way this thread has been handled. If I talked to my customers like that on a site people are paying me to use, I would lose subscribers quickly. In addition the wimpy forums will increase the frustration level of your user community and leave an impression that your site is not as well implemented or as competitive as it could be.

Frankly I am not as concerned about the unique problems with drupal.org as much as I am with how Drupal fits the needs of my site. I suspect that many here share that perspective. Just because you don't want (or need) a specific feature here does not mean that your situation mimics the rest of the world. Your responses were overly defensive. That contributed to them becoming somewhat insulting to somebody that was breaching an issue that many of us may share to varying degrees. Therefore I found myself also somewhat insulted by your responses and I hadn't even posted anything at that point. Such responses discourage people from volunteering constructive criticism in the future.

I simply do not wish to implement a solution that is dependent on integrating two different products into one site. I want to spend my time making my site great, not wrestling with integration issues. A hybrid site also creates upgrade problems that are not welcome.

I am not trying to insult anybody here, but I feel that the forums module was not well thought out. Some decisions were made that create some serious issues. I feel that you would have been well served to go a different way.

The forums are based upon a Forum Topic node that accepts comments. It appears that the template for comments is independent of the template for the forum pages overall. This makes it more difficult for me to customize the appearance of the forums without having the changes to forum comments also appear on comments to other content type such as blogs. While I am new to Drupal and do not completely understand theming yet, this added complexity is neither necessary nor welcome.

This situation also creates issues for CCK since the implementation of comments does not use it and forces the maintenance of two different content types that being used to serve a single purpose. In fact the independent administration of comments from content, and the absence of comments in the administration of content types, lead me to believe that they are not strictly a content type at all. Instead comments seem to be a special case. Comments are just as much part of the content as anything else They should have been implemented and treated like any other content type.

The forums would have been much better designed by having a forum topic consist of two different pieces. The topic itself should be only a pointer to the first post in a discussion and a place to track settings and statistics for the topic as a whole. Each post (including the first) should be implemented as a single content type. This allows for more simplified and consistent theming as well as allowing modules such as CCK to have a consistent overall impact on all posts in a forum topic. You also do not need to maintain two different content types this way.

I feel that this single design decision has probably curtailed a lot of potential development on the forums because everything you do washes into the comment module as well as forums. You would have to develop them in concert. Any changes you make to comments will impact all of the comments on all of the other content types as well. Some people may want the additional function in the forums, but not on comments attached to stories, for example. Because of this the comment system really should be entirely separated from the forums. It may be more convenient to deal with them the same way in development, but real-world site usage habits suggest they are not the same thing at all.

I am sorry for the length of this post, but I have been wrestling with this forum issue for two days now. I am frustrated with it. I feel Drupal is a fantastic CMS and deserves high praises. I am just seriously disappointed with the limitations of the forums. I am also disappointed that this may force me to use a CMS for my project that I feel is inferior simply because of that point. The forums on my site are going to be very important. So please, let's stop being defensive about the limitations of the forums see if we can address it in ways that move toward solutions so I can use Drupal for my project.

sigh

sepeck commented 5 October 2007 at 18:44

We're not being defensive.

This is open source. People scratch their own itch. No one is paying anyone to answer questions. All to many merely want to complain about the perceived limitations about forum module. When people link to, point out and show that many of those complaints can be solved with contributed modules they then get very angry and rant because it's not done already for them for free.

Those who disagree, claim we are insulting them. Claiming you are insulted when you have not contributed is also irritating. This is a form of emotional blackmail and is done to justify ones denigration of others and try and guilt others into doing for them as they demand/wish/desire. Comparing an open source product to a 'company' is also a clear mis-understanding as none of us are paid to be here. You started your entire post with this stuff before you even got to the actually interesting part. Your little lecture and accusations now hangs over your proposed solution.

If you want things you believe will be improvements, then you must work on them by contributing code and reviews of others code. Or hope that someone who is interested will do it for you. Or pay someone to submit such improvements for you. As it stands, improvements to forums in Drupal 6 is done and the API frozen. You will have to wait for any additional improvements when development for Drupal 7 is opened again.

You can join those interested in improving Drupal forum module on the Drupal forums group, or you can wait for others to do the work or you can use a different CMS.

The CCK code started getting added to Drupal in version 5, released this year. Book module has been converted to use it in Drupal 6. Forum module was tweaked to accommodate it but I believe that forum node itself is still it's own content type. I do not recall anyone interested actually contributing code to convert forum content type to CCK type this time around. Someone who is interested in this happening will have to contribute code and reviews if it's important to them.

Drupal is over six years old. It has had 12 full releases. If someone wants to take the lead to scratch their own itch and get involved on improving forums, then that would be good. Otherwise it's just not interesting and is a rant. And OFF TOPIC on the original post too.

Propose your new forum design on groups (without the negative denigration of the volunteers) and get feedback. Then, when the Drupal 7 code base is opened up to contributions, begin submitting patches. That's all it takes. Really.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Exactly

Quint commented 5 October 2007 at 20:25

I didn't 'get it' at the beginning, and complained about my difficulty in getting started. Since then, I've spent a lot of time in Drupal, and Drupal.org, and I 'get it' now, and I wish I hadn't posted a complainer post or two at the beginning.

Drupal is an amazing collection of code, and it's free. You can put up 20 sites and it's still free. You can read the code and see what it's doing, you can modify the code if you want. You can use modules or modify them. It's great.

Commercial code has support (usually), and you can attempt to demand help, or fixes, or whatever, And since the sellers want to keep charging for it, they usually will help you (but not always). But if you wanted to put up 20 sites with vBulletin you'd have to cough up around $3000.

I guess it boils down to karma. If you are paying someone, you can expect a certain amount of responsiveness. It's not that Drupal isn't responsive, it's just that you can't really expect it. Like Steven says, it's all based on volunteers,

Personally, I have learned to love open source. It is what it is. It's a big collective of people making improvements as they can and want to. If you don't like something, you can look for a fix, try to fix it yourself, or ask for help.

Mr. Peck, Let me explain why

Glorifindel commented 6 October 2007 at 04:02

Mr. Peck,

Let me explain why you are so off the mark in your assessment. If you read my entire post you will see that I mentioned what I consider to be design flaws that hamper effective development efforts. That should have immediately told you that I was analyzing the problem and looking for answers on my own. I was not expecting you or anybody else here to fix my problems for me. I am quite capable of doing that on my own.

Since I am new to Drupal and the development effort here I am still navigating my way around the massive amount of information that is necessary to get "up to speed" on the design and APIs. My PHP skills are rusty and facing this type of steep learning curve always carries its own frustrations. Many people will often quit before they accomplish such a task. It is a more effective use of your time to just go get something that more suits your needs.

When I am facing such a task, I do not start asking many questions until I am at the point where I know enough to ask the RIGHT questions. I do not wish to waste your time (or anybody else's) on this site. So when I search the forums for previous posts concerning the issues that I face, then I am merely trying to be responsible in how I approach this issue. I am performing due diligence to prevent as much repeated effort as possible.

When I come across posts where the developers are being less that professional in the way they are treating others then I get a red flag sent up. I have to seriously question whether I want to spend my time and efforts to help develop a project that may have some people in it that I simply do not wish to deal with. Remember, I would be a volunteer too and I do not wish to waste my free time sucking up to egos and strong personalities that are not being professional.

You could have said everything that you wished to me or anybody else on these boards without the antagonistic tone. All you had to do is simply state the facts of the issue. In my case you could have simply pointed me to the information you gave in your last post. Accusing me of emotional blackmail when you have no idea what I am really doing is presumptuous. In fact, I was doing exactly what you were suggesting and every single cutting remark you made becomes misguided because of it. Wouldn't it have been better if you just didn't say them at all?

My point is that you are part of the team that is developing Drupal. If you wish to get more people to contribute and work well in the project do not categorize them without reason. Just because somebody posts something negative does not make them worthy of a flame in return. The developers need to represent the Drupal project in a more professional manner than that. You discourage the very thing you claim to want people to do because nobody wants to deal with that kind of nastiness.

...

sepeck commented 8 October 2007 at 03:30

You felt the need to criticize and tell people you don't know what to do in your 'search for information'? You further assumed that people in this thread were actual Drupal developers, another incorrect assumption. Looking at the list of participants in the thread. I believe only one might have contributed code or code reviews to Drupal core and his contribution in this thread was to correct a link in my reply.

You could easily have started off just asking your questions. It would have gone much better for you. Instead you choose as your introduction to assume facts not in the thread and include those little personal asides that drew my attention.

You choose the method to introduce yourself to the community in a rather antagonistic and judgmental way. Your starting assumption is very 'off the mark'. I stand by my interpretation of your post. This thread was about converting from vbulletin to Drupal forums and is over a year old.

You will either choose to use Drupal or you won't.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Your links don't work for me

Glorifindel commented 6 October 2007 at 05:19

I tried to follow your links to the Drupal forums group and groups but they do not work for me. The system generated links on the page work fine. I have to admit that I am a bit lost still. I have had my login to this site for less than a week. I am still trying to figure out where everything is at. My frustration with all of this is washing out some and rather than having people help reassure me and help, I am getting sniped at. It has not been a very welcoming experience to say the least. Is this the Drupal dev groups initiation hazing process? ;-)

Correct DruBB link

dnewkerk commented 6 October 2007 at 21:24

Hi Thomas -

The correct link to the Drupal group where forums are being discussed is: http://groups.drupal.org/drubb
(it looks, from view source, that Steven may have accidentally forgotten to add the URLs to his anchor tags)

Conversations in the group have led to a lot more understanding about what "needs" to be done to improve Drupal's forums, and have led to some upgrades for Drupal 6's forums, and one installation profile (which I haven't tried as of yet since it's in Spanish)... though there's still tons of work to do to take it to the finish line. Hopefully we can get things revved back up there (as things have got pretty quiet in the group lately) and pool our various resources and talents together and make something great happen.

For me personally, I started out as a full proponent of vBulletin (having discovered Drupal initially in my search for the perfect CMS to join with a vBulletin forum), but have gradually been changed by my experience with Drupal over the past year. I've gradually decided that I prefer the idea of having a fully integrated user experience between my forums and the rest of my site, rather than two separate systems that will never work and feel quite the same to users as they move through the site. I "do" desire substantially greater functionality than the default Drupal forum has (and even can have with all the usually-suggested module additions) but not a monolithic forum application like vBulletin (and many of the features I'm after are actually site-wide, not just forum features afterall). I'm learning PHP, and have finally gotten pretty good with more advanced Drupal modules and concepts, though my contribution undoubtedly can still not be programming at this point. I do, however, have a lot of thoughts and notes about what Drupal forums need, and am willing to donate financially towards that end as well if we can organize and plan how the raised funds would be spent.

Anyhow, I wanted to encourage you not to give up on Drupal over this issue... it can be difficult to communicate to others the needs we as admins/webmasters of large community sites have discovered as we've worked with our communities over the years, using tools we've come to rely on in larger forum applications to make it possible on such a large scale. Developers approaching forums from a perspective of "smaller scale" forums don't usually have the same priorities as us (e.g. my forum has about 20,000 users, and I know a lot of other forum-centric sites have far more than that). So it is up to us to figure out how to communicate these ideas, and organize, raise funds, and develop the solution ourselves (and in such a way that all of our preferred features are there for us, but don't have to be enabled for others who prefer not to have them).

Hope this helps, and I hope to see you over in the DruBB group. I plan to talk to a few other motivated forum developers asap and see about setting up fund raising and other planning... will post in the group once I know more.

-- Dave
absolutecross.com

=-=

VM commented 7 October 2007 at 02:04

I fixed steven's link, it had an extra </a> in it causing the link to be unlinked.

_____________________________________________________________________
Confucius says:
"Those who seek drupal answers should use drupal search!" : )

Some Advice...

NiteWatcher commented 24 October 2007 at 08:05

Steven,

Please don't become like vBulletin's dev team and be "touchy" over Drupal. It just alienates.

The problem with free alternative software is exactly what you pointed out: I-don't-have-the-time issue. When you have a business, you need that dev team to care about keeping your business afloat. That's the only real positive vBulletin has going for it now, but it's so important. I need 24hr security bug fixes. I need someone who will devote his working day, just for such emergencies -- not tell me that this is a free product, take it or shove it. It's not worth the time or effort to want too.

What I would love to find (am I asking too much?) is a free or even a fee software without the phpBB eat-your-young attitude if you question the company's direction (hey, it's a community and community has needs); and having a problem related to the software.

A good product defends itself, it doesn't need attack dogs.

I despise the programmer "I'm god" attitudes at vBulletin's websites. I despise their 15 year-old mannered mod/hack community, but that's all we have today -- bunch of bloatwared; I'M GOD; over-sensitive guys who deliever a product that is one of the only ones that is security conscious (unless you're a Rothschild who can bankroll your private programmer to do it for you).

Give the rest of us non-programmers a REAL alternative, with REAL customer service. Be it free or paid. Folks will be climbing over you to get your product, and it doesn't matter how popular another product is, if you can deliever it -- with security in mind for business types -- and an attitude of a graciousness, it will be king.

I'd like to point out another issue: the greatest complainers complain because they love a product but are fed up with it's delivery. Otherwise, they'd leave and do something else (much like the vBulletin original programmers did with their mod for UBB). Those who stick around to fight an issue, want the product to excel. That's why smart companies aren't very quick to ban, they understand this even if it doesn't look good. They know they need honest feedback (not only read rah rah rhetoric), because they'd lose touch with reality -- that population who never heard or used their product, the very population that needs to know the true pros and cons of a product.

You will get these folks, and they will get under your skin, but if they're willing to fight you over a direction it's usually because they care to do so. No one has the time to waste just typing away for nothing.

Develop and deliever. The end-user will be the final judge and jury...give them a reason to judge your product fairly, and in your favor.

P.S. vBulletin: your blog extension, sucks. It needed to be a standalone, not chained to a forum as a plugin. You have to diversify, or the Drupals and other products in the pipeline, will close your doors down. Branding won't help, the buggy whip makers learned that well.

...

sepeck commented 24 October 2007 at 16:17

First. I am not a programmer.

Second, if you need your list, then you need to pay someone money. You can pay a Drupal developer to be your support person or go pay for SharePoint or equivalent.

Third, this may be a Drupal site, but this is NOT a forum for denigrating vBulletin or your hang ups with their site and forums.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Hi Glorifindel, welcome to

Liam McDermott commented 8 October 2007 at 22:40

Hi Glorifindel, welcome to the Drupal community!

I can understand your frustrations, Drupal itself has a steep learning curve and the forums--by default--are pretty basic. Although with some module magic, they can be made to do all sorts of good stuff. :) As for the rest, sepeck is right when he pointed out that many deficiencies are being addressed, you can help out by joining the forum group (if you want to).

Your issues seem to boil down to not being able to theme comments according to the node type, is that correct? It is possible to theme pages by their URL, have a look at this documentation. You might also consider the Node Comments module.

As sepeck pointed out not many of us are core Drupal developers, I have never contributed a patch (or indeed anything) to Drupal core. :)

We were being grumpy with one of the people above because he was judging the Drupal forum module based upon how the forums at drupal.org are setup. This is silly, it's annoying when someone demands something be changed when they haven't even bothered to look and see that it's just a matter of changing a setting in the admin menu on their site. You, on the other hand, actually have bothered to learn how the forums work. The problem with the complaints in your post are that this is Free software, we all own it as much as each other, if there's a problem/deficiency with it we all have to work together to fix it.

----
Web Design, GNU/Linux and Drupal.

Sigh...

NiteWatcher commented 24 October 2007 at 08:08

We were being grumpy with one of the people above because he was judging the Drupal forum module based upon how the forums at drupal.org are setup. This is silly, it's annoying when someone demands something be changed when they haven't even bothered to look and see that it's just a matter of changing a setting in the admin menu on their site.

The exact same attitude. Defending turf.

...Sigh...

=-=

VM commented 24 October 2007 at 11:47

I'd like to note that: you've created an account approx 5.5 hours ago (at time of this comment) at drupal.org solely so you can reignite this dead conversation.

You've chosen to open an account, point fingers and talk about things that you despise and then you even have enough left over to be pretentious enough to give advice. : )

In case you didn't notice you are on a Drupal volunteer support forum.

People defend what they love & understand. We, as a community and users of Drupal, appreciate what developers do. I'd state that we, as a community, appreciate what all developers do. Though developers who do what they do and give it away @ no charge, hold a specical place in our hearts.

Essentially you come off very much like a jilted lover. vB (your girlfriend) won't do what you tell her to do. Essentially, She said no. Now you are pissy and taking it out on patrons at the watering hole across town, instead of your local watering hole.

I can't help but question your intentions and your motivations.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

vBulletin to Drupal?

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