Bit of a vB Blog disappointment

[Jamie Edwards]

I had big expectations for vBulletin Blog, and I am sure many others who had the same expectations as me also feel that they were not met.

Thousands of companies look to and use vBulletin to power their message boards and forums (or some would even grow communities using vBulletin, as opposed to letting it exist simply as a feedback and messages board).

A blogging system that simply gives every user (permissions depending) a blog of their own, without the possibility to create a main blog or a company blog that more than people can post to renders the system useless for a huge proportion of your customers, I think.

Think of most of the blogs that you come across - from businesses, from software companies, from organisations - they are shared, several of their staff post to it, and sometimes they have multiple blogs (such as a Developers blog, an Execs blog) etc.

I can point you to Microsoft, to Google, to SoftLayer, to EDS, to ModernBill, to the RSPCA. I could even point you to the nature of vBulletin's own Announcements (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=1) forum - where more than one vB staffer posts announcements.

I think that the way vB Blogs has been designed is going to be worthy for very much a niche market and will end up completely missing the boat with one of vBulletin's core markets -businesses, corporations and organisations like those I have described. They do not want for each of their board users to maintain a blog - they want a company blog, a developers blog etc etc.

Maybe it is my fault, for not recognising the direction in which vBulletin will go when the discussions of the 'social networking' element were about.

I would not usually rant - I would normally just go off and find something else. But I and I know many others were really looking forward to another smashing vBulletin product, because vBulletin software is fantastic.

To summarise my rant, basic blog functionality is missing - and I mean really basic. Group blogs, a main blog (i.e somecompany.com's Blog).

Please, guys - properly consider how blogs are being used today.

[raiderlax]

I personally think the blogs are quite nice, but I guess it depends on what you are going to use them for for the most part.

This is only the first version that has come out and a lot of people have been complaining because they wanted this system out so fast.

The future versions will most likely get better and better just like the forum software :)

[South Fork]

Bit of a vB Blog disappointment
Agreed. Function is limited, exposure is limited, layout is not clean at all. If I think that, so will those using other blog applications that I would like to offer to use my site instead. Presently there would be nothing offered for them to do so.

[Jamie Edwards]

Don't get me wrong, a system that scales so well and allows for every member to have their own blog without a system explosion is clever and impressive as a development achievement.

Unfortunately, I think it is too clever and has missed basic blog functionality, as South Fork said, that would allow for integration and consolidation of systems that manage content.

[Alteran Ancient]

Remember, vBulletin Blog Version 1.0.0 has just been released. This is the Blog system taking it's first step through the doorway into the real world. As it's the first release, there is much room for change, improvement, tweaks inclusions and such. You're pressing your opinion, and these suggestions and feedback are read by vBulletin's Team and Developers. Now you've brought this limitation into limelight, I'm quite sure that the Developers will release an improvement that allows joint/shared blogs in the near future. There will be bug fixes and etc. in a few weeks, leading to released of 1.0.1, and maybe not too far down the line, will be some future improvements.

If there is a problem/inconvenience that affects many people, the team will fix something quite quickly. I've seen this in the past when the ACP's Yes/No bullet selection options were changed to be listed vertically instead of side-by-side. This was fixed a few days later when a majority of people expressed their confusion and unhappiness against the new layout.

(I'm really sorry if I dragged on a bit, but you must realise that just because people can only have individual blogs at the present time, it doesn't mean it will stay that way for long.)

[Freddie Bingham]

One of my top goals is to allow multiple users to post to a single blog. We also wish to have a developer's blog so it is a feature that we are waiting upon as well.

[Jamie Edwards]

One of my top goals is to allow multiple users to post to a single blog. We also wish to have a developer's blog so it is a feature that we are waiting upon as well.
That is good to know then, and I take back my rant - I thought vBulletin had completely lost the forsight for this and how blogs are used today (and were trying to develop pseudo-MySpace software).

Sure, little MySpaces of our own would be nice. But please don't forget basic blog functionality;

1) Ability to create blogs (not just users each have a blog)
2) Ability to assign users or groups permissions to that blog (viewing, posting, editing) etc
3) Ability to link directly to a blog and have it look like a dedicated blog (i.e. when viewing the blog you should be under no impression there are other blogs in the system - a company will not want their community member posts being shown on the same page as their main blog)

[Gladius]

This feature will be one of the main reasons we'll buy the blog addon... so we'll wait until it's added.

[Razasharp]

This is very similar to this request: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=241412

Only addition is having a seperate page to sort specific blogs.

It would be good if we could have multiple blog homepages, based on what we set in admin cp, eg:

blog-home.php - the main blog homepage where admin set what blogs to show (site blogs, various user blogs? etc)

user-blogs.php - shows all the users blogs (like the current blog homepage)

specific-blog-1.php - admin set homepage for blogs we want for this particular page... could be for anything, reviews? news? anything, then specific-blog-2.php for the next, etc :D

[Jamie Edwards]

I don't think this would be needed - blogs.php?name=something or blogs.php?user=4353 would be sufficient.

Redirection could also be used to have URLS like www.your.com/forum/blogs/username (http://www.your.com/forum/blogs/username) seemlessly redirect to the user's blog.php?user=35353

(You can go steps further = www.your.com/forum/blogs/username/date/entrytopic (http://www.your.com/forum/blogs/username/date/entrytopic) and so on - a feature you see in Wordpress blogs or vBSEO).

This is very similar to this request: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=241412

Only addition is having a seperate page to sort specific blogs.

It would be good if we could have multiple blog homepages, based on what we set in admin cp, eg:

blog-home.php - the main blog homepage where admin set what blogs to show (site blogs, various user blogs? etc)

user-blogs.php - shows all the users blogs (like the current blog homepage)

specific-blog-1.php - admin set homepage for blogs we want for this particular page... could be for anything, reviews? news? anything, then specific-blog-2.php for the next, etc :D

[Sergio68]

Technically speaking I like it.

What I'm concerned about is the look, it's too much vbulletin/vbadvanced like. The column on the left is too present, I would like to have a more clean page, more "classic blog" like.

This is not a complain, take it as a personal opinion.

[diettalk]

Technically speaking I like it.

What I'm concerned about is the look, it's too much vbulletin/vbadvanced like. The column on the left is too present, I would like to have a more clean page, more "classic blog" like.

This is not a complain, take it as a personal opinion.

I agree.

[Michelle]

I was really disappointed to figure out that the primary id in all the blog tables is either the user's userid or the id of the blog entry...
I was expecting that there would be something like "blogid", which would refer to each blog.
The current database schema makes it very difficult to allow multiple blogs per user. :(

[swissbob]

I think that I will wait until group blogs are available too. My users really aren't interested in individual blogs - I know because I set up a blog system before and it just died a death.

What might work is group blogs, where there is a collective purpose. BUT this will have to be integrated into the forum, even if that means I have to use the RSS feed reader to read the Blog feeds on my own blogs! That seems like a waste of processing power so some proper integration would be nice.