3 topics on vb4 I would like to talk about

There are 3 issues with vb4 that I keep thinking about. Maybe the word "issues" is not used in the right context, but lets just run with it.

1 - Why has it taken so long for a CMS to be released? My opinion - vbulletin/jelsoft should have offered some kind of article content management system years ago. And I dont mean last year, or year before last - it should have been offered 4, 5 or even 6 years ago.

Since I started using vbulletin I noticed one thing between updates - the project had grown stale. The attempts to add customized profiles were a failed attempt to keep up with the myspace craze going around at the time.

Instead of focusing on real changes - the management of vbulletin decided customized profiles were more important then a news article system, search engine friendly urls, built in sitemap,,,,,, and a lot of other stuff and customers wanted.

My opinion - the vbulletin project has grown stagnated and has fallen behind the times. I'am going to guess somewhere between 3 - 6 years behind where they should be. I blame the previous management of jelsoft for this. They wanted to sell a mediocre product, that offered no real changes for a premium price.


2 - You can not put the CMS where you want. Right now it "has" to be in the same folder as the forum. This is not very flexible and is sure to create a lot of problems.

It seems like the CMS is being developed in the 1990s instead of the 21st century. Why do we "have" to be locked into using software a certain way?


3 - The project seems rushed. Why rush something out the door now when it should have been developed years ago? There is no need in rushing anything, when management dropped the ball a long, long, long time ago. Rushing a product right now is not going to make up for years of management sitting on their hands.

---------------

Its as if the new management came in with all of these fresh ideas - which is good. Then its an "oh crap, do you realize how many years we are behind the times?" moment.

In my opinion, the vbulletin developers are going to have to work 80 hours a week for the next 3 - 4 years to make up for the lost time, and then to gain ground that was lost through the previous management.

I like the direction that the VB 4 project is going, but it should have been done years ago.

The management of jelsoft should have listened to its customers, paid attention to social networking trends and adapted. Instead, the project has fallen further and further behind the technology curve.

 

I don't blame anyone for not wanting to take a stab at this. I will, but only once.

The fact that vBulletin released MySpace-like profiles (actually I think they're more FB-like than MySpace) rather than a CMS is hardly the fault of the "previous management". Remember, IB had already purchased vB by that time and pushed for the profiles.

You are blaming the "previous management" for alot. IMO, you have no idea what you're talking about. Also, imo, vB is hardly 3 - 6 years behind the times. That's absurd.

 

The previous management cant have been doing that bad a job, since vb was very sucessful, and not just 3 - 6 years ago.

I dont know why they choose not to make a cms earlier, but it appears they decided to go for blogs first - perhaps because there wasnt much other blog stuff around for vb3.5+, while there were (and are) some very good cms (well portal) systems, such as VBA.

BTW, the customisable profiles were (IMO) a complete waste of time, one of their few bad mistakes.

 

Exactly Paul. It was the previous management that drove vB to be the #1 forum script on the internet.

AND the fact is, active members at vB.com were asking for profiles. It's not like the devs just up one day and said HEY let's do new profiles!
Nope. It was a very often-requested feature.

 

At one time Dodge, Ford and GMC were very successful. Until toyota got into the full size truck market, then who turned to the US government for a bailout in 2009?

Times change, this is not the 1990s, or even the early 2000's anymore. For communities based on forums to be able to compete, we need more then just a forum. As forum owners we need tools to build flexible communities, not rubber stamps.

VBulletin is successful forum software, there is no doubt about that. But to stay on top of the game you have to adapt. Instead of changing with the times, vbulletin has grown stagnated - and has been stagnated for a long time.

Hopefully the new management can turn that around.

And the members of the vbulletin community were asking for a content management system for a long time - and those request fell on deaf ears.

 

You're right that vBulletin hasn't changed much... but just because time goes on, the necessity to change isn't necessarily prevalent. Yes, the clock is ticking, but nothing is wrong with remaining stagnant for a little bit as long as you are still the market leader.

vBulletin being the market leader is certainly questionable, but if it isn't the leader, it isn't far behind. It seems to me that you are basing your criticisms off of nothing but the passing of time. :shrug:

 

Perhaps the man-power of the original limited-sized development team wasn't enough to be able to produce a quality CMS. Maybe they knew this and didn't even attempt if they knew they'd most likely fail.

Who knows what the reasons are for the lack of production in this aspect. I'm sure they didn't sit back and say, "Let's not make a CMS - just to piss the customers off :mad2: ... let's work on a blog add-on instead." :ohi:

 

have you ever noticed how many people look at other peoples "profiles"? It does a count right there in the box for you. In a year i've had well over 2,000 people look at mine.

Yea...there definity not #1 priority on a forum...but it makes it a little bit easier to steer all the facebook/myspace type people to log in to yours/my forum a little more often.

I think everyone needs to stop the complaining about vb. Its BY FAR, the best forum software on the market..no contest. I dont care what anyone says, i'll say that untill i'm proven wrong.

The real question here...is "would vbulletin be AS good if it didnt have vb.org?"
--

as far as a cms? Why focus so hard on that when theres vba? If you sit down, and start actually playing with vba...its a powerful a55 tool...

---thats all i have to say.

 

I agree that it's not good at all that the CMS doesn't run from ROOT directory instead of the Forums folder. I guess the only way around that then is to install the forum in the ROOT directory and not in a forums folder.

Personally, I would do that anyway, if that's the case with the CMS. Just like I do with my IPB3 Board.

 

The internet as a whole has changed over the past 3 or 4 years - myspace has come and gone, and now facebook is rising to power, other social networking sites are around and gaining membership.

This shows that social networking is a force that needs to be dealt with.

Did the previous management of vbulletin do anything to adapt to these changes? I think not.

Would Boeing be an industry leader if they only made prop driven air planes?
Would Intel be an industry leader is they only made a single core CPU
Would microsoft be a leader if they only made windows 95 or 98?

Will vbulletin remain a leader if all they make is a forum?

 

I don't like your #2 point either, that the CMS can't be placed in the root or any other folder, restricting it to the same folder as your forum is just ignorant.

ps.. I saw your thread at the .com the other day when you had asked about placing the cms in other folder, this was the first time I heard of it. I guess I just assumed you could place it in the root if you wanted to. :|

 

When I saw the reply to that question at .com, first thing I thought - "this "is" the 21st century,,, right? And we are about to finish the first decade of the 21st century, right?" Then "why" is the CMS being coded like its 1995 or something.

Please get out of the stone age people, and step into the space age.

Is the vbulletin project really that far behind that not only is it years behind the times, but we can not put the CMS where we want?

We do not even have a one click solution for members to unsubscribe from admin emails.

With every passing year it seems that vbulletin is stuck in the days of and windows 95 98.

We have quad core power house computers, we send the shuttle into space on a monthly basis, we have hybrid cars that get 40 miles to the gallon, we can even cure certain cancers - but for some unknown reason we have to have the vbulletin CMS in the same folder as the forum?

Its a good thing the old management of vbulletin does not work for boeing, we would have never broke the sound barrier or reached super sonic flight.


Maybe, just maybe the new management can get us past this 10 year "hump" vbulletin has been stuck on and move us into the 21st century.

 

Without the contributions of the authors and the commercial 3rd party script providers vbulletin would be far behind. but then, we could say that about any forum script software if they didn't have their add-ons from 3rd party providers free and commercially based.

Everyone knows my views about 4.0 so I won't drag that out because its not worth my time, especially when a healthy previous version does it's job well (with a vast amount of redundant/ unfinished features I'll add).

The real question isn't would vbulletin be as good without org but do you realise how much (as a vbulletin customer) you are tied in to using 4.0? What happens if you want to stick with 3.8, your license runs out and a security flaw is found in 3.8? you have to buy vb4.0 license.

How long will it be before the 3.8 scripts are archived at the org? I'm sure internet brands would love to archive that area as soon as gold comes out so users are more likely to upgrade to the new licensing.

I could go on but they are my biggest concerns as a user sticking with 3.8. Enough that I recently purchased a domain that doesn't have the vbprefix in it which mine currently has.

 

But for the average forum admin who wants a basic article CMS and SEO urls, what are the options? There aren't many.

Personally, I go back and forth to both ends of the spectrum. Right now, it's a rapidly evolving love, hate relationship.

 

you can do what I did
wordpress, or vbadvanced
vbulletin 3.8
and vbseo
all 3 work very well together IMO

 

The user profiles, from what I remember reading, were the result of vB customers seeing what Invision had, but wanting something better, which they got. The GUI of the vBulletin profiles isn't great, but the functionality for messages and editing is something IPS missed on, and vB nailed it when it came to functionality. It would have been better if they put user content somewhere on a tab and not a hyperlink under the Stats tab. IPS took vB's stab and made something better than what vB had done. Although, it awaits to see what happens down the road, since both software giants have had issues running AJAX on profiles or posts in the 3.x and 2.x lines respectively.

 

A long while yet. We only archived the 3.0 area earlier this year. Archiving 3.8 isnt even on the radar. The next area in line is 3.5 and possibly 3.6 - but atm the only thing being considered is locking them from new releases, not archiving them - since no one is realistically making new releases for 3.5/3.6 and even 3.7 these days.

 

Thius would be the best course of action.

Archiving 3.0 was fine as many of those hacks don't work on 3.5 or above once the product system came in.

But loads of 3.5 hacks are still relevant to 3.8 and work absolutely fine.

 

Hey all, first post will have to introduce myself in the other forum but what led me here was a search for how to adjust the width and center my forum is vb4. Read all you posts as well and figured I'd offer my opinion if you don't mind.

I think vbulletin was made successful in many ways by keeping it simple. It's a forum software and a darn good one. It's not myspace and it's not facebook and it shouldn't even attempt to try to be. Social networking I agree is a great thing but vbulletin isn't a social networking software it's a solid forum software, (or used to be IMHO). The original developers kept it clean and simple and that's why it became number 1. It's the original core development team that took vbulletin to a level where IB or another company would want to invest in it. It was the simplicity of it that brought value to the product.

Now, by comparison with other forum softwares our there, the other key ingredient IMHO that made vbulletin successful is Vbulletin.org. That's the place where social integrations are being made, facebook and google and the community adds-on different improvements and modifcations to meet the needs of the changing social world. Additionally, vbulletin.org provides ratings of these products and the discussions and a way to sort through the modifications. Go to other forum softwares and it's not as easy finding what you want based on user ratings or amount of installs. IMHO, vBulletin.org is as much, if not more responsible for the success of vBulletin forum software.

We also have contributing companies like vBSEO and vBadvanced which have extended the vbulletin software and built their companies around it. Anyone who has a vbulletin forum software can tweak and extend it to no end with the modifactions that are provided. We also have good CMS that can be integrated into vbulletin like Joomla, Drupal etc etc.

I'd also like to throw out a comparison of the Joomla and Drupal CMS systems. Joomla is more successful, (even though drupal is better IMHO) because of it's presentation of the addons and modifications. Just look at the joomla extensions page and compare to Drupals, this is a lot like comparing vBulletin and vb.org to IPB. Presentation, ratings, etc. of the modifications makes all the difference in the world.

So when we talk about vBulletin being behind, I disagree. McDonalds could be considered behind because their BigMac hasn't changed... but that's what makes them successful. Likewise, what made vbulletin successful has now changed completely. Not only did it change but looking at it, they seem to have attempted to stab their supporting companies in the back... like vBseo and vbadvance by trying to extend themselves into areas that are outside what made vbulletin successful.

So Kevin, onto your issues, vbulletin IMHO should have never made a CMS. It's not their bag. Making the forum software more easily extendible, making social integration a core benefit of vb, those would have been more in line.

vBulletin 4 has gone a direction that I feel is wreckless to say the least. To understand wreckless, just take a look at the amount of confirmed bugs and sql queries in this wonderful new beta system they've released as GOLD. Not to mention, not offering a choice to use 3.8 with the blog or upgrade, (downgrade IMHO) to the vbsuite.

I was one of the pre-buyers of this crap and have installed the gold version and have worked on setting it up. The problems with the software and it's klunky integration really sucks. So, I want to stay with vbulletin 3.8 because that's the best version to date. So when I asked Steve at vb to allow me to download the blog because I'm sticking with 3.8, he stated that it's no longer available even if you've purchased the suite.

So all in all, I'm disappointed more than anything else. vBulletin 4 is a basket case of software and it's moved in a totally different direction than what made it successful to begin with... And now we are forced to upgrade.

Seriously though, I'm in half the mind to file a class action lawsuit so that people that were suckered into buying the vbsuite 4 and are not allowed to use 3.8, that IB can take 4.0 and give back the good product they originally purchased to the community so we can continue development of a solid forum software program based off 3.0. It would be a big undertaking but that's never stopped me. GGGRRRRR! LOL.

From the pre-purchase to releasing vbulletin 4 as a GOLD stable software, vbulletin and IB did a real doosey on their existing customers.

Sorry for the rant but flat out, vbulletin 4 simply sucks!

 

Thank you for your input on the topic.

Personally, I think comparing a cheeseburger to the internet is an unfair comparison. Not much has changed with a cheeseburger over the past 20 - 30 years.

On the other hand, a lot has changed on the internet over the last 6 - 12 months.