Fetchall for VB?

Such code is not available by default, but surely through vbulletin.org or by coding it yourself.

Floris -

I just noticed something very similar is being done at pulsetoday.com

Isn't that site related to daniweb.com somehow? Maybe
Dani can tell me how its done?

Sincerely,
Travis U.

Pulsetoday is run by a moderator around here, who is also a good friend of mine :) I'm not sure what he uses for his portal, you'll have to ask him yourself. I think a blog script unless he changed it.

However, the vBulletin.org hacking community does offer some portals and CMS's that are based on the backend of vBulletin. The most popular ones are vBIndex and vBAdvanced. Both will let you post news and latest threads from your forum onto a homepage / portal. They also have lots of other features such as latest polls, user info, etc. :) There are also some article and news scripts that are available off of vBulletin.org

As for what powers DaniWeb's portal - it's a custom solution that I actually coded myself ;)

Travis I dont know about VB but IPB has two very good mods sdk and ssi which lets you project/fetch different parts of your forum like stats, latest posts, most read posts etc onto any html or for that matter any third part portal. I am sure there is a similar sdk or ssi hack for VB also.

Floris -

I just noticed something very similar is being done at pulsetoday.com

Isn't that site related to daniweb.com somehow? Maybe
Dani can tell me how its done?

Sincerely,
Travis U.

:) We had that system up till yesterday and were using the excellent vBadvanced CMPS (vBadvanced.com) for managing it.

We ditched that system because our members are used to the classic forum view on the homepage and were finding going to the forums directory inconvenient.

As for choosing between vB and phpBB I would suggest vB. There really is not any comparison between the two!

I, too, would prefer to have my forum index be the site's homepage. The reason why I'm not doing this is because I want to emphasize that we're not just forums, and therefore feel the need for a portal to demonstrate this.

I also started with forum index as my main page but growth became stagnant after a while and I figured a forum is only as successfull as the content you provide. There are exceptions though where forums have become big just as forums but 90 percent of time in my experience you have to have a content front end at one stage or the other. We started off with a bang getting over 50 users per day to start of with when we were forum only but gradually the activity started to slow down because our forum was just there to talk, now with a full content front end our site has become a one stop place for everything related to that particular subject.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the replies. So does anyone know of similar mods to sdk/ssi that
Scribbler mentioned but for VB?

Yeah Ive been leaning towards VB as it seems more complete out of the box
and the documentation looks good, as ive never run a forum.

The things that worry me a bit are...

1. Unlike phpbb which is opensource and not likely to die anytime soon VB is
privately owned and if the owner gambles away his business or something we
are all up a creek.

2. The structure of the licensing locks everything down. I went over to vbulletin.org
to look at the mods and couldnt even pull up a screenshot without beign licensed.
Totally rediculous if you ask me. If vbulletin.org is "the" main owner community then
maybe I should ask around among you guys if there is any place more hospitable?

Thanks much,
Travis

1. Jelsoft has thousands of customers -- it's more likely that an open source project would close or cease development (lead developer has a kid, they get sick of supporting the program, etc...). vBulletin on the other hand is staffed by numerous support personal and paid developers; any business can fail but there comes a point when the risk is minimal and for the next 3-5 years that risk is minimal for vbulletin, beyond that no one knows what the web will look like.

2. Piracy is a huge issue with paid software, espcially web scripts. vBulletin locks down their forums to stop people who pirate their software from being able to download addons. This makes perfect sense -- deny pirates access to additional resources and support while granting them to customers; we get more help as owners instead of resources being devoted to people who hold no valid license. As a registered license holder you have access to vbulletin.org for addons and vbulletin.com for support, how-to questions and suggestions.

With this said it's not like phpbb is a bad option, for some people it works and it can work well. However, I take the opposite approach of your points. I enjoy large scale open source projects for my server OS and other components but when it comes to smaller utilities like a forum I prefer knowing there is a paid staff behind my product, not a small group of programmers who have little interest in supporting their program for the long term (note: just because it's "open source" doesn't mean other users can update the main source, like vbulletin only the core developers do that while the community contributes addons and suggestions for code only). Having an established and respected company behind my software means I know who to call at 3am if my site goes down and who to hold responsible for a security breach. Opensource works well for many applications but is not always ideal, and in this case it is not ideal for me -- the same may not be true for you.