vBulletin To IP.Board – A Short Journey

Cheyne Wallace is a Sydney based Monitoring / Platform Engineer and Availability Manager – http://www.cheynewallace.com
http://www.soundpunk.com is the SMF site mentioned in this article to be converted to IPB

A long time SMF user , iv been growing a community based on an Simple Machines Forum for many years, and I have to say, its been great.
SMF has never given me troubles, I had complete control over my styles and templates, wrote several mods my self without ever really needing to understand the core system.

Upgrading the platform was dead simple, login to your panel one day and it tells you a new update is available, click update, it pulls the files down, checks that it wont break anything and prompts you to continue, all in all about a 1 minute procedure. Simple, (No pun intended)

SMF is great, although like many, the time has come for my community to expand, we often have people writing full length articles and posting in the forum, only to have them be bumped back into oblivion and never seen again, either that or end up with 400 sticky posts which is just messy.

I need a CMS, I need blogging, I need to post articles, and host downloads properly not as attachments. Im not interested in messy WordPress and Joomla bridges , despite the fact a WordPress blog is exactly what I want, iv been down that path before and it always turned out messy.

Fast forward to about December 2009, im looking around for a new solution, iv been a fairly big forum user over the years and I was very aware of vBulletin and its standing in the web community.

I begin investigating vBulletin licensing, my eyes widen as I see a new product is being launched over at vBulletin.com – vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite

Blogging, Articles, Image Management and the Forum, all in one package. My prayers have been answered. The screenshots look good , modern, the feature list looks impressive and there’s a pre-sale discount ….. 2 days remaining

Im not big on buying things before I see them or use them , but being a revision of vBulletin , I knew it had to be good.

I whip out my credit card , and buy it. I spend the next few hours dreaming about my new mega community.

Track forward a few months, the product is released, its gone Gold , I eagerly download my copy and run it up on a local WAMP server, I get several errors during the install , I manage to get around them and get to the site. Looks good so far.

I click around, notice a few bugs but nothing too bad, I login to the admin panel and im actually disappointed to see that it looks identical to what it did many many years ago.. literally

The interface looks something like a 1990s ecommerce site, cluttered and ugly. Im heavily into good design and aesthetics, one of my biggest pet peeves is a big complex product with a terrible interface, and ugly design, my opinion is you’ve done the hard part, now finish the job and polish it .

I decide to become an active member of the vBulletin community, I sign up and start talking on the forums, I soon see a very visible trend, many many angry customers.

I begin reading all these and see so many problems. Many of which don’t concern me, some that do , some that im not sure, regardless theres no way im converting my forum across to this, so I decide ill wait it out , im sure it will be fixed soon.

I begin designing my theme/skin while im waiting , that way im ready to implement when its all fixed.
I get about 80% through it , its looking good, albeit the same structure as the default theme, its still pretty good. Im feeling confident, im excited to launch.

Flash forward, 4.0.1 is released , I eagerly download it . my problems are sure to have been fixed.
I realize that an upgrade using vBulletin is actually pretty painful , manually overwriting all your script files using FTP seems like a step backwards, I was used to point and click upgrades, anyway , I do it.

Upgrade complete , lets look, wtf , my theme is completely broken, elements seem to have more padding then before, previously unfloated objects are now floated, the site is completely unusable with IE6, it looks a mess. I start trying to fix everything , it takes me about a day of work, there goes my Saturday.

I decide that im just going to wait until I hear from the community that its rock solid before I do anymore work.

I look around for mods, im surprised that vBulletin.com doesn’t actually run its own mod site , instead you have to get them from vBulletin.org , which looks like the 1990’s admin panel. The site is old, and tired looking, the mods are fresh but I cant help but feel like im downloading patches off a warez site , I feel weird about applying these mods to my $285 forum script, I know its fine , but still, it feels dodgy, I have to maintain two separate user accounts and join them together using my customer number. Dodgy.

Weeks pass and 4.0.2 comes out, I read the forums before I bother upgrading my own instance.
The problems are still not fixed, many are, but many aren’t.

I see a similar trend, many people complaining about broken skins, bugs not fixed, show stopping errors.

I make a post and try to get some answers, and I get them, basically it goes like this.

• The admin panel is more advanced than others, and is not seen by the users, therefore its design doesn’t matter. Yea right.
• The style of the forum is going to be constantly tweaked over many of the next revisions, which basically means any new skins I make will be prone to breaking.
• The “Ad Sense” integration , is pretty hopeless. It sticks a banner up the top or the bottom of the page , that’s it . Seriously , lame. Wheres user control? group based adverts? Post count advert exceptions? I had a free mod that did this on SMF.

Im starting to feel like my momentum is slowing to migrate my site, the level of work required to get it to where I want is huge, and that’s assuming everything goes perfectly, which of course it wont.
I pretty much resign my self to the fact that I cant use this software for another 4 months or so at this rate, I don’t want to implement a site with so many known errors, and also see my finely brushed skin become broken on the next update.

I turn to twitter, I see trends of people migrating to IPB (Invision Power Board)
I start to investigate, this forum is different , looks nice. Subtle things about its usability start to catch my attention, I sign up for the demo.

The admin panel is clean , stylish and modern, plenty of control without being completely over burden with controls, most noticeably its layout and design looks like its been made for users of all skill levels, not just people who have been using the product from Version 1.

Its different enough that I have no idea what im doing , but im still able to find my way around. Again, VERY clean, now THIS feels like a $285 piece of software. Invision understand the value in usability and creating a clean environment for the administrator to work, after all it’s the admin that pays the license fee, so why wouldn’t you want to make his experience better ?

Their pricing model is different, they have renewal fee’s per 6 months, although this is optional, if you choose not to pay your forum still works fine, you just loose access to support and customer areas of the vendor site.
This is fine with me , I see my self letting the renewal time lapse, and ill just renew when I have a problem , which in SMF terms was maybe once every year . Renewal is fairly cheap, $25 for the forum, $10 for separate applications.

Weeks pass, im still holding a vBulletin Suite 4 license, still hoping for some magical turn around , the patch of patches to fix all errors, it doesn’t come though.
I feel sorry for vBulletin staff, they’re madly replying to angry customers , copping flack left right and center, they get harassed for not answering everyone’s questions , but any idiot can see that there is just far too many to respond to, they do how ever try .

All of my questions get answered , so I have nothing to complain about, hats off to them, and it becomes obvious that much of vBulletins problems spawn from the “Internet Brands” take over of Jelsoft. The product has been rushed out, laden with bugs.
The product feels like its been tested on a single environment , with a single browser, on a local machine, with a single set of test data. It runs great on a high specced laptop , running WAMP, with Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 , but that’s not reality, reality is shared hosting. Internet explorer 6, virtual shared hosts , with 300 other sites on the same virtual machine, shared databases with minimal resources, vBulletin 4 CMS has a stupidly high query count, people reporting upwards of 165 queries just to load the front page, how are you supposed to run that on anything but a dedicated server ?

All of these factors start to add up for me,

I sign up for my 3rd evaluation of Invision Power Board 3

Im starting to get the feel for the forum and blog, IP.Download looks clean and I still have no idea what im doing with IP.Content never the less 2 hours later , I list my vBulletin 4 license for sale on twitter. It sells for $220 , I lose $35 , eh well.
To their credit , vBulletin responded to my request to transfer the license quickly, and had it completed in 24 hours.

I purchase my IPB package , IP.Board, IP.Blog, IP.Content and IP.Download. I get a 15% discount for buying the package, I also get a $50 credit to my account to use for future renewals, nice.

The process is clean , the client panel is nice to use, raising a support ticket is simple and clear, I receive a friendly reply within 2 hours, NOW I feel like a customer, for the first time since I decided to upgrade my SMF board im feeling like my money is being put to good use. I get that excited feeling back , thinking about what my new revamped site is going to look like.

Its unfortunate what has happened to vBulletin, and I have no doubts , a year from now that these problems with be rectified , and staff may be able to actually keep up with the volume of requests then, but as it stands now it still feels like beta software.
I know a lot of people are using it for production, and it appears that the forum is mostly fixed, how ever the CMS just isn’t there for me. I also have a need to create some really custom pages, such as http://soundpunk.com/?action=throughtome, which from tutorials id seen appeared to be difficult and hackywith vB , although IP.Content was made just for this purpose.

Certain things like advertisement management that I had begun searching through mods and hacks for vBulletin with , already existed in the core product with IPB.

Having worked in IT platform engineering in the banking world for several years has made me a stickler for quality and plugging in 3rd party code to my production platform makes me feel un-easy, I hate the thought of buying quality software that’s passed QA and change control , only to plug in bloated, poorly written code from a random contributor to fill a gap that shouldn’t of been there in the first place.

Albeit, from what iv seen there are some very good quality mods out there, how ever without surveying the code my self, I have no idea how efficient or well written it is, that’s what I was paying for.

The reality was for me that I could of continued down my vBulletin path , how ever it would of involved a descent amount of modifications to get it where I needed it to be, where as IPB is pretty much where I needed it to be now, this played the deciding factor in my decision to switch , despite the fact I hadn’t even got off the ground yet.

Reading this back , it appears as though im slagging out vBulletin, and praising IPB , whilst im praising IPB , shooting down vBulletin is not my intention , its still great software , and has a mod community like no other, how ever this isn’t for everyone , and while im sure the minor additions that I require to meet my expectations will probably come in the near future , there is no road map , and no indication that they are, and currently , making requests for additional features is like trying to talk on a mobile phone at a concert , there’s just to much noise to get noticed, not to mention the devs over at vB have got plenty enough on their plate as it is.