Technology for the New site

I am interested in learning about the decisions to use Joomia/Vbulletin for this site. Specifically I am wondering if Drupal was in the mix and what factors were considered.

mactoph wrote:I am interested in learning about the decisions to use Joomia/Vbulletin for this site. Specifically I am wondering if Drupal was in the mix and what factors were considered.

We did consider Drupal. To be honest, the packages are very similar to each other in functionality. We were impressed with the number of extensions we could add to Joomla to customize it (for example a bridge between vBulletin and Joomla) and we also found it much easier to administer .. especially when it came to some of our content providers. For a while we had drupal running next to joomla on a test machine. At some point we just had to pick one and Joomla won out.

As far as vBulletin goes, we needed to have excellent moderation tools (both community based as well as admin based). vBulletin had all of our check points we were looking for.

Tom

A client is considering phpBB. I have suggested they look at vBulletin as well. I haven't set up either system so I can't really give them pros and cons. Did you consider phpBB for this site? Do you (or anyone else) know the major advantages and disadvantages of each?

As for phpBB (I am an admin for one of a phpBB board) I can say that it is very elegent and has a quick update cycle (new update every month) but if you do any customization you have to repeat that after each update. Also they would have to work on developing a professional looking skin since it's default wouldn't work with this.

I moderate one other forum that is built upon phpBB and it is nice, simple and effective. We needed a forum that had a lot of moderation controls (both community as well as admin) and was very flexible and extensible. vbulletin fit the bill. As an example, with vBulletin you have the ability to add "hooks" into the system to trap certain system events (such as login, posts, etc) where you can add custom modules to the system. When they update the core software, you don't need to re-apply all of your patches. I'm not trying to sell vBulletin but simply discussing some of the features we looked at when selecting a BBS.

For many open source or community forums, especially ones that don't have money to spend on software, phpBB is a very nice option.

Tom