Thread

Hi there,

I’m running an online community using vBulletin for about 4 years now and I since I’m really sick of the software I wonder if it might be possible to export/import a vBulletin based forum to ExpressionEngine?

I don’t want to lose any content, so all of the user-accounts, posts and image-attachments should be preserved. Is such a thing possible at all?

Thanks! 😊

You’re not the first person to ask this! If you want to use vBulletin with EE, you might consider our addon vBee which bridges membership between the two:

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/184525/

If you’d rather start over and import into EE’s forum then that’s another task altogether. Happy to talk about it with you though. PM me.

Thanks for your reply, but I want to get rid of vB altogether… 😉

Thanks for your reply, but I want to get rid of vB altogether… 😉

I very much doubt anything exists to do it in that direction. The other way? Sure.

In terms of features EE’s forum is a little bit lacking compared to vB, so are you looking to move a forum, or are you looking to bring a forum to EE but take advantage of EE’s other regular (non forum) related publishing capabilities to expand.

What irks you about vB?

looking to bring a forum to EE but take advantage of EE’s other regular (non forum) related publishing capabilities to expand

Yep, that’s exactly what I was looking for! I just grew sick of vB over the years… but never mind, it’s not that important.

I’m also interested in hearing what irks you about vB. Not that I disagree… I currently have a very large vB install (165k members and 5.75M posts) and am trying to figure out what to do. Our forum is the hub of our site, but I’ve been working hard over the last year or so to build out the rest of the site with the hopes of pushing the traffic into other areas (So far EE and Solspace has been really great for this side of things). In that time, I’ve probably flip flopped a dozen times on whether to stick to vB or take the plunge into the EE forum add-on. Now that I’ve been turned onto Xenforo I’m even more mixed up on what to do.

Being so tightly integrated into EE is amazing, but the forum itself feels on par with something a decade old. For the most part I’ve really liked vB and to be honest I’m amazed at how solid its been over the years consider how little maintenance we do. In general vB’s features feel years beyond EE’s forum add-on. Xenforo on the other hand feels like its years ahead of vB.

So what to do?

Anyhow, not to hijack your thread but I thought maybe talking out loud to someone that might be in a similar boat might help us both out.

Here’s a thread you might want to keep an eye on as well: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/183513/

A lot of people are in similar boats. In fact, if EE had updated their forum a year or so ago, they might have hit a gold mine since people are leaving VBB in droves! The short and sweet basics are:

1. VBB was bought by a public company and did things which angered a lot of their base.
2. The newest version - 4x - is not liked by a lot of older VBB users! They feel that 3.x is the mature app (shades of EE here?)
3. The VBB public company was then bought by ANOTHER holding company…my outside assumption is that they failed in many ways (Internet Brands), and were forced to get out.
4. The lead developers at VBB responsible for up to 3.x left the company and started Xenforo - they are being sued by their old employer (the holding company, now).

EE is vastly more integrated with the CMS parts - and much better for creating a complete site with - than VBB and most other forums.
But EE has been hot and cold on upgrading and caring for the discussion module, and it remains to be seen if they have the resources, desire and programming power to catch up to the newest features.

Super, I don’t think there are any EE forums with that number of posts - and without such, you have no idea of whether it could even do the job! We hit a wall last year, but the wall came down when we upgraded our dedicated server. Still, VBB is known as handling larger sites than EE (just due to the number of sites, you have more examples!)......

So, what to so? If I were you I would not move to EE until I saw a couple sites in EE with that number of posts…and, just as important, the max number of online users at one time…so you can gauge whether it can scale up.

I don’t think the VBee thing is right for very large forums - it is great for those who have EE and then want to use VBB as the forum module, etc…..

Short and sweet, my suggestion would be to stay where you are for now and look at what XF does over the next year as well as EE. If you need lots of crazy add-ons, you probably won’t want to move to EE…..not as many people developing (an understatement!) for the forum….....

On the other hand, if EE changes course and decides to be a forum “player”, I can attest that their forum is stable, works well and was able to do the vast majority of what I needed it to do….I’ve been using it since 2003!

I also use the other parts of EE to some extent…...I will likely still use EE even if I switch forums sometime in the (far) future!

thanks for the detailed post handyman!

unfortunately, I cant wait a year to solve this issue. 3 months, maybe… but a lot needs to happen in that time and i sort of doubt anyone else is on the same timelines i am. i am holding out hope at what eevolution is discussing here: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/183513

i’m fairly confident that loads won’t be an issue. we have a pretty robust setup… dedicated server with a highly optimized custom build of litespeed sitting behind a caching server. we actually saw loads go down after migrating to EE2, and since the forum add-on is relatively simple, I’m wondering if forum loads would actually go down if we were on that system. so far is discussions with EL, they seem confident it can scale to suit our needs, but we can only test it by implementing it and i’m not really ready to commit yet due to what i’ve mentioned above.

i don’t mean to come off like i’m always criticizing EL, but i really don’t see them doing much with the forum despite a mention of doing exactly that back in some other thread. between them trying to get a handle on the support situation here, continuing work with EE2 (especially in regards to the file handler), it seems to me they’re stretched to the max as it is.

i love eevolution enthusiasm, and look forward to what they develop, but its hard to hold out hope of a solid solution without sitting back waiting for a year or two for the product to evolve into something that might be able to compete with all the modern features found in xenforo. seems my only real option is to go with the ee forum and just forego all the features that really make it feel like a modern discussion platform, yet have it integrate well into the rest of the site. or skip all the great integration and continue having what is essentially two sites: a forum + everything else.

it truly feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation and i keep teetering between the forum module and xenforo. our traffic really is rooted in our forums as hard as i’ve been working to push it around, so it seems like the smart thing is to go with the best forum system on the market - xenforo. but then again, making such a move means there’s little chance that will ever change and if so, its hard for me to justify the development effort with the rest of the site - EE.

damned if i do, damned if i don’t.

If I was able to move to XF easily, I’d probably consider it and then use EE for the other content parts of the site - BUT, I am lucky in that my other content parts of the site don’t need login…that is, they are mostly articles and other such content. So dual sign-in is not needed.

But my comment about waiting….is that sometimes you get “sick” (as you say) of something (VBB), but it still satisfies most of your and your users needs. If that is true, or can be made true with some tweaks and other stuff, then staying put is doing no harm as you can always move to XF later.

All in all, I try to hold myself back as much as possible - it’s better to be behind the curve than ahead of it…conservative is the word! There are ALWAYS burps and hassles in changing and especially so with a 1.0 product like XF.

In short, I could strongly consider XF if I were starting a forum only site today, but a move takes a LOT more thought. Do a Ben Franklin…..
Put the pros on one side of a piece of paper
put the cons on the other side….

and weigh it all out. Then always think “what’s the worst that can happen?”. What IS the worst that can happen if you stay with what you have for a year? Etc. etc. (you don’t have to answer me!)......

Interesting insight - thanks Handyman.

My advice, if you want to add a community to a CMS based site, EE is a decent place to start and you’ll grow with EE’s offering. If the community is a majority part of your site, then you’ll probably be disappointed with EE’s forum. Issues with vB’s management aside I think if anybody went from vB (any version) to EE will discover features they took for granted in vB that are not available.

EE’f forum is an add on, one that’s been neglected. There was a bit of chatter recently about EL planning to upgrade it, but (and I am sure EL will agree with this) their track record has not been great pairing saying something and doing something. It’s certainly not being actively worked on if the Forecast is anything to go by. In fact that tool which I once coveted the introduction of has simply drawn attention to how slow thing do move.