Phine Solutions web work notes

One of the big events in the forum software world this year is the release of vBulletin 4.0. As a license owner I took the pre-sale bait and purchased a new license for vb 4.0. The software looks not bad to me after I installed it on a test domain. CMS and Blog are nice additions. HTML table tags are gone. Although themes created for 3.x.x will no longer work and have to be completely re-done it didn’t make much difference on what I wanted to do.

After I dig into it a bit deeper this new concept of “StyleVar” really got into my head. It is as tedious to work on as it can be. So I hit up on the internet and see if there is any tips or tricks that I can use. Surprisingly all I got were complaints on VB 4.0. There seemed to be a lot of negative sentiment against Vb, specifically the 4.0 release.

Some mostly talked about complaints are:

• Expensive and confusing upgrade pricing.
• Skins created for 3.x.x versions need to be re-done completely in 4.0.
• No significant changes in 4.0 and the code base is quite bloated.
• The “Gold” release is still buggy.

As I sip through these and figuring I probably made a mistake purchasing 4.0 license I found Invision Power Board was being mentioned by a lot of people and got a lot of nice reviews too.

So I decided to give IPB a try. IPB offers a free 24 hour demo account and signing up was quite easy. After a little play around I was totally impressed by IPB 3.0.

What I really like about IPB 3.0:

• The demo capability upfront.
• The modular design approach. The IP.Board, Blog and Gallery are individual components that can be installed separately. Now this might not sound like a benefit for most of the people but to achieve this feature the code but be designed well from the ground up.
• Powerful templates. The template design in IPB is very powerful, it contains variables and logics (such as if for foreach statements) and can take PHP code block directly. For lot of the board admin who don’t have the technical skills this might be a bit of difficult to manage but developers will like it.
• IP.Converge, which provides a nice framework for the Single Sign On solution that I have been looking for for a long time.
• The more advanced features like OpenId, Facebook integration and API capability.
• Skinning IPB. Since I develop using HTML and CSS the approach that IPB takes feels easier.

What I don’t like:

Based on my personal experience the quality of documentation is a bit lacking. Part of the reason for this is that comparing with VB, IPB still has a small developer community. The IPB developer community hasn’t been as much active as VB’s, in terms of participating development discussions, writing tutorials etc. So if you have a question it takes a bit more researching and digging around.

Yes I switched to IPB 3.0.

Forum softwares have been powering the web for a long time but as new things emerge forums need to adapt too. It is a lot harder to run a forum board these days because of the low barrier to entry – a lot more forums are online these days – and competition from social network sites. This demands higher standard on forum software. Looking forward IPB has a lot to gain in the paid forum software market.

That being said vBulletin is still the most popular forum software at the time being. But it has been sitting on its own success for too long. Unfortunately its own success may be the biggest obstacle toward bigger and bolder innovation. The new 4.0 version is definitely an improvement but the change fell short. From what I gather most of the existing board admin chose to stay on version 3 and IPB 3 has become a serious choice for those who needs new forum software. So now it really is a do or die moment for VB and the vb team needs to get their act together to come up with a better next generation release to stay in competition.