Thread

I have a question that I would love to get different viewpoints on.

The functionality and power of vBulletin is undeniable to my forum members.  They would riot if I attempted to change the forum software despite the fact that we can make it look VERY similar from the outside.

For that reason, I am forced to consider the compromise of a bridge between a vbulletin and EE login.  Has anyone done this or attempted to do it?

The problems I anticipate are if either software significantly changes the login setup, then the bridge needs to be rewritten. 

If you are interested in this, then there has been some discussion to pay a professional developer to create it but I never like to create the wheel.

though i know this question has come up from time to time and there are many threads referencing this, i’d like to bump this along and express my desire for the same thing. to be honest, i almost decided to not purchase EE over the facxt that it didnt integrate with vBulletin. even now after using EE for a while (and really liking it), i’d probably still jump ship if i found something that even came close, yet had vB integration.

is this really that difficult? granted the EE forum module is great if your just starting out, i cant imagine it ever being capable of replacing a large and established forum done up with vB. i have about 4 million posts and 80,000 members and can say for fact that it would be a nightmare to try and take on.

though i know this question has come up from time to time and there are many threads referencing this, i’d like to bump this along and express my desire for the same thing. to be honest, i almost decided to not purchase EE over the facxt that it didnt integrate with vBulletin. even now after using EE for a while (and really liking it), i’d probably still jump ship if i found something that even came close, yet had vB integration.

is this really that difficult? granted the EE forum module is great if your just starting out, i cant imagine it ever being capable of replacing a large and established forum done up with vB. i have about 4 million posts and 80,000 members and can say for fact that it would be a nightmare to try and take on.

Superaven, PM me.  I am considering paying somebody for this and would be interested in splitting the expense to have the logins/accounts syncronized.

PM’ed…

anyhow, i know this to some extent undermines EE’s efforts in building their own forum. perhaps that why it hasn’t been done. however, i’d think that the number of vB users that this would appeal to, and the subsequent sales, would far out weigh the losses from EE users not purchasing the forum module.

i’d like to hear from the EE developers if there’s ever been any serious effort or consideration in doing this? have you guys analyzed the vB database and really mapped out the logistics of such an integration? was it simply a matter of way too much effort, or is there another reason for not having already done this? i’d gladly contribute $250 towards a true solution to this.

Yes - it’s been discussed before.  Grab a cup of coffee and read (especially the responses by Rick Ellis): http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/26201/

thanks for jumping in and providing that link. even after lots of searching i somehow missed it.

anyhow, reading now…

still reading, but this sort of begs the question of really isolating the differences in features between the two forums. perhaps, i’ve been missing it somehow, but it doesn’t seem like EE is trying very hard to sell the forum module. simply listing it as yet another module available with a basic paragraph worth of description really isn’t enough. i mean this is a huge deal to most site owners. in fact, it ranks right up there with the CMS itself, if not more significant. it would really make sense to have an entire section dedicated to describing the features in detail and showing screen grabs, etc.

in fact the photo gallery and commerce module would benefit from something like this as well.

After reading a few of the entries in that thread, I would simply like to see a universal login so my members do not have to login twice.  At this point, I cannot expect massive integration, but integration on the login would be very helpful for my members to make comments on my EE blog without having to login twice.

Some have used aMember Pro with some success to use multiple software packages with a unified login.

I’ve put a fair amount of time into researching this, including emailing EE. Honestly, I’m still a bit unclear about why this is virtually impossible even if it is technically possible. It’s hard to swallow the argument that it would take too much effort to integrate when other apps like aMember manage to do this with not just two, but more like two dozen, different scripts.

I also attempted to look into the possibility of simply using the EE forum altogether. Unfortunately, there’s no place on the EE site I’ve found that really gives you a detailed feature list, comparison, or does much to really sell the product. Also, from what I’ve been able to uncover, there’s also no import script (virtually every major forum has an import script for the competing forums). Honestly, it’s hard to have confidence in the EE forum, when so little effort has gone into promoting it’s advantageous and features beyond a basic statement that a forum is available and it integrates fully into EE. I started trying to do a side by side comparison of the EE forum vs vBulletin, but then just gave up for lack of enthusiasm. I mean, isn’t a complete feature list and comparison to it’s main competition something that EE should provide if they really want to customers to seriously consider dropping their existing forum for the weblog module? Also, the lack of a stable and reliable import script just seems to indicate that EE only cares to provide new forum owners with a solution, and at best, half heartedly cares whether you migrate away from your existing forum to their product.

Apologies if I come off like I’m bashing EE, because I think we all firmly believe it’s among the best (If not the, the best) blog/cms system available. Clearly, they’ve gone above and beyond with their consideration and execution of EE, as well as followed through with a great site to really tout it’s features and sell the product. For now, I can only conclude that the forum is simply nothing more then an additional module available amongst many as it’s presented. Rather then a seriously capable forum that has the potential to stand up against competing forums, let alone industry leaders like vBulletin.

Hi Superraven,

Thanks for your feedback. We’ve responded to such questions before and I really don’t want to rehash it all again so let me just summarize a few points we’ve touched on before.

1. Its not our intent to be a vB replacement or the replacement for any other forum package. Its our intent to provide a fully featured and integrated forum with EE, which is exactly what we market and provide. That a forum doesn’t have a certain feature from some other forum package doesn’t mean it isn’t “full featured” it means its different.

2. Migration and integration is not the easy thing you make it out to be. Providing import scripts between forums is not the same thing as importing into a forum *and* a CMS. This has already been discussed at great length. Either you believe us or you don’t. We’re not lazy or liars. What aMember does is not true integration but it certainly meets the needs of some people.

3. EE is a “seriously capable” forum. If it weren’t, we wouldn’t use it ourselves. “Seriously capable” doesn’t mean “exactly like vB”. Your “nothing more” statement is rather nebulous. You make it sound like having a forum tightly integrated with a solid CMS is a small, easily accomplishable task. In what way isn’t our forum serious? Because we don’t have a comparison chart? Because we’re not trying to out-feature vB? Which brings me to my next point.

4. Comparison feature lists are a poor way to choose a forum (or a cms) solution because it introduces a false assumption: That a longer feature list somehow makes a better product. Either a particular package meets your needs or it doesn’t. If one package has more features it doesn’t make it better by default. Its always best to choose a solution based on the features you need, not which package was more features.

Why would you decide on a forum by comparing ours to vB? It would be much better to list out your needed features and see which product is the better fit, not which product has the longer list.

In short, if you need a powerful, full-featured forum integrated with EE, our forums are wonderful. If you need vB specifically integrated with EE, you’ll need to find a 3rd party solution.

There is one way that I have come up with but it’s not exactly an integration, to be honest I don’t how well it would perform on a popular website. You would need to make the member/user tables from both products innodb and then use transactions to keep them synchronized. You would need a vb plugin/product for this as well as extensions for EE. You could share things like username, password, private messages etc. Now just because I said you could share them doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, you are effectively doubling the amount of queries for both scripts.

In EE you would need to “map” usergroups to vbulletin. Just say you had a super admin on EE who was only a member on vbulletin. An administrator on vbulletin could edit the “super admins” password and then login to the EE control panel and visa versa.

It’s basically how subdreamer cms works with their forum intergration, you would map groups over so these conflicts don’t happen.

General operation would be like this:

Bob sends Tom a PM through the main site (expression engine), the message is stored in the native EE tables as well as the VB tables. (2x queries)

Tom reads said message on vbulletin, vbulletin needs to change the status of the message (read) in both tables.

It would work the same for deleting PM’s etc.

You could share username, display name (can be added to vb via mod), password (only when it’s submitted by the user, EE and VB use different encryption methods), profile info, pm’s.

Now as far as I am concerned, VB and EE would definitely need to be in the same table. This would make things a lot easier because the scripts wouldn’t need to change connections.

Disclaimer: I am not saying this would definitely work, but I have been looking into it because I have a site that runs EE and VB. It’s just an idea at this stage.

Please note that just say I was able to make this, you would then be restricted in what versions you could use. i.e this would be so delicate that upgrades to EE and VB could break it and you would have to wait until new versions are released.

I was planning to have a go at this in about 3-4 months time. The great thing about this method is that all the native member/user functions of both scripts would continue to function without any problem since they both store their own copy. You could write custom EE tags to wrap any the popular vb website integration mods so show latest posts etc on your website.

Transactions would ensure the integrity of the data.

Please also note that the minimum requirements for vbulletin are

PHP 4.3.3
MySQL 4.0.16

this would then be the minimum requirements for ExpBridge.

The ee forum is very capable in it’s own right, the only reason I have a dire need for this is the fact I had my vb long before ee. If I tried to make my members move off their beloved vb, they would probably hunt me down. I’m sure some of you could relate.  :lol:

Again, I’m not going to pretend that I have thoroughly researched this, I still have a lot of work to do. I don’t want to be like that smart ass in the 2005 thread who just wouldn’t give it up. (about the “provider” pattern 😉)

Well that’s my idea.

Give me a choice between best publishing system with functional forum and best forum with functional publishing system and I will chose the best publishing system.  The EE forum does the job just fine.

The lack of integration between parts and data is a general problem of the web.  You can’t expect the EE developers to create a bridge for VB any more than you can expect the VB developers to create a bridge for EE.

If you do start down the road of creating bridges, where do you stop?  There are too many forum scripts available.  If you start creating bridges for forums then users might request bridges to other things like shopping carts. 

Look at Amember for all the ugly possibilities.  One of the major features of this script is to integrate with the membership systems of other scripts.  How many of the Amember bridges are up to date?  The Amember plugin for EE has not been updated since version 1.4 and I am not even sure it works anymore.  A different company might stay more up to date but I think this shows how daunting such tasks can be. 

I believe a better solution might possibly be increased adoption of Openid though I am not sure something like that would provide a perfect solution here either.

Well, I guess there is a hackneyed dilemma of choice between complexities and perfection. EE is the only CMS I know flawlessly incorporated almost everything possible (forum, wiki, gallery… you name it!) in the one integrated system. Of course every component as a standalone program could be more complex, but why we need all this whistles and bells here in EE?

I think if EE made the bridge and charged for it people would buy it. Afterall the Intent of the EE Developers is afterall to make mony right? If not they would be giving away the script.

Allt hat needs to be bridged are the usernames and usergroups. no need for double quieres when it comes to private messages etc, just disable the EE private message system. Thats all that needs to be done.

I really want to switch my site to EE, as I am in love with the software and use it for one of my newer sites. But the forum software just doesn’t cut. It may be Full of Features but it lacks all the Features my 30,000+ users are use too.