vbDrupal 5.22.0 released

[elmuerte]

Drupal 5.22 was released yesterday due some security bugs (http://drupal.org/node/731710). vbDrupal 5 has been updated to contain the same security fixes. You can download it here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vbdrupal/files/vbDrupal%205/5.22.0/

One of the security fixes is part of the core, so it's advised to update to this version.

[elmuerte]

While I have your attention. The vbDrupal project is in desperate search for new developers to pick up the development. Almost 4 years ago I took over developer of vbDrupal from tamarian who created the initial vbDrupal 4.6 releases. I continued maintenance of the 4.6.x branch and continued development of the 4.7.x and 5.x release. I also worked on getting an initial alpha release for 6.x. And that's where it pretty much stranded.
As some of you might know, I don't use vbDrupal professionally, in fact, I don't even work in the website development business. So all the work I did was in my spare time. And that's where part of my problem lies, I don't have much spare time, and also not much motivation to invest time into vbDrupal development.
Maintenance releases like this one don't take much time, and I happily create them. But Drupal 5 is reaching end of life when Drupal 7 is released. So we really need developers to finish the vbDrupal 6 branch, and continue with Drupal 7 (and vBulletin 4). I think I created fairly decent documentation on the changes I made, so anyone with a decent knowledge of PHP and experience with Drupal and vBulletin should be able to pick it up.

So if you're up to the task, please let us know so that this project doesn't die.

[All4Data]

Thanks El M .. hopefully we are able to interest some developers

your work is always appreciated

[warm woolly sheep]

Might be a good idea to ask around on drupal.org and vbulletin.org

[Cooper1662]

I cannot contribute by programming but I would be happy to volunteer monetarily to further this project.

Please let me know how much would be necessary and how many man hours you think would be required to advance this through the latest versions of drupal and vbulletin and I will do what I can.

ElMuerte, please shoot me an email whenever you have a chance as I would like to discuss this with you. Thanks!

[warm woolly sheep]

I'd support this becoming a pay project as well, or anything aside from going away!

[Mikhal]

Will it be necessary to run the update script when updating from 5.21.0 to 5.22.0?

As for the project status update, I have a lot of experience with PHP and have done some vBulletin programming for the vBulletin 3.7/3.8 series. Have you posted your documentation anywhere? I'd definitely be interested in reviewing it.

[Ca9ine]

I'm getting a little concerned these days.
Has there been any interest in carrying the torch further by anyone, elMuerte?

vbDrupal is the only CMS for me, and I'd hate to see vbDrupal fade away as its only 100% stable versions are of the 5.x branch, which you said in your above post, will become unsupported in the near future come the release of 7.x.

Is there any working and 100% stable production sites using the vbDrupal 6.x alpha?

[Tom-E]

i've been investigating moving my ~4million-post vbDrupal site entirely to drupal, converting to the drupal forums. But thats a tough call bearing how much vB has going for it.

-- But it realy feels like theres going to be a rift here between ppl going entirely VB4 (forum&cms) and people going entirely Drupal, even though both options aren't favourable today.

I'm betting on Drupal prevailing over VB, but at thesame time, the dev on their forum has never been taken very seriously. Only in contributed modules (again done mostly by a single dev) has there been moves forward...

I have done miniscule work on VbDrupal6 alpha, but I've found php-dev to be quite frustratingly slow -- and because i'm not free very often, just couldnt invest enough of myself to move forward with more momentum.

long term, i feel the best thing for everyone would be Drupal taking its forums seriously, instead of supporting a bridge for commercial software thats competing with the CMS we here seem to think is best?

[Cooper1662]

I have made the decision (yesterday) to move my drupal site, with 5,000 articles, over to wordpress.

I can bridge both the latest versions of wordpress and vbulletin whereas as of now I cannot update to the latest versions of either without breaking vbdrupal.

It's probably not going to be easy, but at this point I think it's the best option for me.

[warm woolly sheep]

I guess I'll try to migrate to the vbulletin CMS if bad comes to worse.

How would I go about redirecting all of my drupal articles to their new URL's, without losing too much pagerank on google? Is there a way to do it by hand? It might take a few days but it's worth it.

[hjmaier]

I started to work on a migration concept to move to vBulletin CMS. I had prefered to stay with vBDrupal.

[Tom-E]

I'd like to her what el. thinks of this?

Maybe vbDrupal is the right way to go, at least for some time longer till Drupal Forum or VB4 CMS improve?

edit:
Other things worth looking at:
http://drupal.org/project/com2vb
http://drupal.org/project/drupalvb

.

[JeffVeit]

A few weeks ago I had to look at the state of play, and decide on our strategy going forward;

IMO vbdrupal (and vbadvanced) carved out an existence because vb had no CMS.

There's a shrinking space now, even if vb CMS still has a way to go before it can be considered polished, or a viable competitor to many (most?) other CMSs.

I think that there are two key questions:

Can vbDrupal keep a critical mass under the competition of vb CMS?
If not, how to move forward?


To the former, despite the best will, I'm inclined to think it's unlikely because vbCMS slows the new uptake of vbDrupal to a trickle. If you are a starting user of Drupal, you are unlikely to want vb, and if you are a new or existing vb customer you are unlikely to be looking to Drupal as a CMS.

To the latter, I see 3 possibilities of varying viability:

Switch to vbCMS

Switching to vbCMS may be viable because Jelsoft have said that they have a conversion mechanism. (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?332911-vBulletin-4-CMS-Support)


Switch to Drupal

Switching to Drupal is possible already, and is likely to become easier since some Drupalistas see vbCMS conversion as a threat to Drupal. (http://drupal.org/project/vbtodrupal) (http://drupal.org/node/682094)


Switch to something else (Wordpress? Drupalvb, etc, etc.)

I'm unconvinced this is a sensible course. For us, I don't think that it's sensible to ditch all our investment and experience in both Drupal & vb, to jump to a third platform. YMMV.




I do not include pushing on with D6 + vb as a viable long-term possibility. VB 3.8 won't be supported forever, and at some point it will become necessary to move vbdrupal to target vb 4. But at this point I don't expect the difference between Drupal bulletin board and vb to be worth the pain of integration

In my experience, the growth rate of Drupal far, far exceeds the growth rate of vbulletin. I don't think Internet Brands, Jelsoft's new owner, will have the cash or will to compete effectively with Drupal as a CMS, so jumping to vb will lead to being marooned with a CMS that is sub-par in the marketplace, but with a good bulletin board. However, it seems to me that bulletin board software is mature; it's not going to get much better*, and while the Drupal bulletin board may be behind vb, it only has to catch up to a static target. In my mind there is also some doubt about the longer-term viability of vbulletin in a marketplace where there's an overwhelming growth in GPL software which is as-good, or better than the closed-source alternatives.

So, I guess my call to action is:
- Let's focus on making Drupal forums as good as or better than vbulletin forums, and lets improve the import mechanism into Drupal so that it's a foolproof, single button press.**

Perhaps the people working on larger sites need a less public place to discuss the issues?

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

* Except if it makes a radical shift to a completely different model of interaction - for example Google Wave.

** No, i don't really think it will ever be that easy.

[All4Data]

I must be honest, I would stick with Drupal as a core before I ever consider sticking with vBulletin

all my future sites are and will not be built with vBulletin

the launching of vB4 displayed a business contempt which caused me to lose faith in their business principles and product

its Open Source for me and Drupal and Wordpress are now the solution of the future

make no mistake, I currently use vB extensively but that is where it shall end

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

As a course of action it is my intention to give vBdrupal a push in May where a newsletter will be sent out to gauge the interest in all the current members of vBdrupal and to make an active push to involve developers in the project

[JeffVeit]

I don't think it was contempt.

It takes a top-notch team to deliver a polished product. But many (most?) of the core developers left with the sale of the business so the new team had less experience. Meanwhile, developing software is an expensive business. So they had a bunch of salaries to pay, with declining income. Naturally they released it the moment that they thought it would cost less in support and goodwill than the cost of development and QA.

[warm woolly sheep]

Thanks to everyone looking for alternatives and converters. Please keep us posted on your solutions.

[elmuerte]

I'd like to point out that with vbDrupal you're not really locked in on either side (i.e. either vBulletin or Drupal). You can either split up your site in the CMS and Forum(*), or move completely to a single product (the latter would require some conversion scripts for the content).

I cannot make any recommendation. You should really investigate the direction to take based on your site's needs.

Personally, I still have some fate in vBulletin as forum software, but I have little fate in their CMS. I also have little fate in Drupal's forum software.

For my site I will probably keep running vbDrupal 5 for quite some time. If I would build a new site that depends a lot on CMS functionality I would probably go with Drupal and maybe use the phpBB integration with Drupal for forums.

I still have hopes that in the future vBulletin will finally fix their software so that an integration can be done through a module rather than needing the fork.

*) there is one important thing you should be aware of. In vbDrupal you could assign Drupal roles based on vBulletin group membership. When you split up you will lose that functionality, so you need to manually reassign roles to users. Another very important thing is that in Drupal the user with UID 1 is the absolute administrator. In vbDrupal anyone in the "administrator" group was an absolute administrator.


ps, for documentation about the changes vbDrupal made to the core see: http://vbdrupal.svn.sf.net/viewvc/vbdrupal/trunk/vbdrupal-ng/DevelopmentDocument.html
Also note that there is quite some "magic" in the "include/vbdrupal/" directory.

[All4Data]

Thank you El

[lucia]

Elmuerte, can you write detailed documentation about the integration of drupal and vbulletin? I have books about Drupal (5 and 6) for programmers, but as for this integration - I'm full zero. So, if you can - I'll try to study out.

[Tom-E]

Elmuerte, can you write detailed documentation about the integration of drupal and vbulletin? I have books about Drupal (5 and 6) for programmers, but as for this integration - I'm full zero. So, if you can - I'll try to study out.

I'd agree. Since it seems like your stepping down for good El, a document like this might be a great boost in getting other devs into this project up to speed quick.

-- A medium-to-high level doc catered specifically to someone not new to development, but new to VB and Drupal programming, that explains vbDrupal.

Hopefully you can find time to do this,

[elmuerte]

I'll try to work on that. The most complicated part of the whole integration is obviously the unified session and user management.

[Tom-E]

any progress here?

[elmuerte]

Thanks for reminding me, I started on it here: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/vbdrupal/wiki/MagicExplained

[Tom-E]

I see you updated it again el,

that's great and should help a lot =)

[CLKeenan]

Any idea when vbdrupal 5.23 will be released? new security release for drupal core today.

Thanks!
-Chris

[warm woolly sheep]

same here!