Drupal/Acquia receives $7 million series A financing

[Razasharp]

I must be confusing you with someone else sorry Truth! (I thought you were an old timer-coder from phpbb).

Dean - Drupal is very community site orientated - just check out popsugar... they have proven that forums are not even a major consideration for a community orientated site. There are loads of other SN /community orientated sites that use Drupal...

[MRGTB]

Drupal is actually an all in one package, I installed it myself a while ago to look at it. And it comes with it's own forum module that only needs to be activated to give you a fully working, all be it a very "basic" forum add-on.

I didn't like Drupal myself, I thought at first I did after installing it, but about 3 days down the line I hated it. I thought it was just to overly complicated myself to get simple tasks done with it. And the admin navigation I thought was bad. And you where just constantly trying to remember how you got to a certain setting (even days later). Eeek!

[Razasharp]

There is a learning curve MRGTB. But there is no doubt it's one of if not the best cms around. There is no other CMS used as widely as Drupal in large professional sites.. there is typo3, but that is really horrible with a much higher learning curve than Drupal and no where near as flexible or no where near as used so much..

[El_Muerte]

TruthE - vbdrupal is a fork of Drupal... I personally won't use forks. Drupaltin is not a fork. Ideally vB would be set-up with flexibility in mind... little things like custom page naming in vb Projects for example (can see some nice uses of it, but project.php in the url is a no no)..

There are good reasons why vbDrupal is a fork. It's because there is no other way to do this stuff properly. If there was I would have done it right away.
Anyway, the required changes to the Drupal core have been shrinking in every major release. And if Jelsoft addresses some issues in vBulletin in 4.x (e.g. get rid of the excessive global variable usage) the Drupal core changes would be even less.

[PcosKat]

I didn't like Drupal myself, I thought at first I did after installing it, but about 3 days down the line I hated it. I thought it was just to overly complicated myself to get simple tasks done with it. And the admin navigation I thought was bad. And you where just constantly trying to remember how you got to a certain setting (even days later). Eeek!

I LOVE some of the sites that have been built with Drupal, but like MRGTB, I didn't like working with it. Too much of a learning curve (for me AND my users.)

[GetGamer.com]

Drupal's forum module is probably too basic for most people used to vBulletin's rich feature set. Conversely, vBulletin's CMS-like features are probably too basic for people used to Drupal's rich CMS features.

My wish? An elegant, easy way to plug them together (and other CMS systems, too, like Joomla).

I'm planning on a non-integrated CMS and forum solution. I won't require registration for "comments" on articles (Drupal), and the list of people who will actually be authoring articles will be relatively short. It seems like the cleanest solution for now.

[Razasharp]

El_Muerte - why don't you join forces with Drupaltin? They seem to be making inroads into doing it without forking Drupal, and from what I read they are asking for people to come on board. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what you guys have done with vbdrupal, but forks are just not for me.

GetGamer - don't you already use a custom-type vb cms solution on bigblueball? Why not stick with that? What features are you missing that make you want to go with drupal?

I am planning a new site and am really stuck between Drupal / vb / vb with gars / vb with vbAdynamics / vb with hacks / etc I'd like to stick with vb as I like it so much and know it fairly well... my main concern is which one would be best for a very high traffic site.

[PcosKat]

I'm planning on a non-integrated CMS and forum solution.

That's how I'm re-configuring mine, now. It seem to be the easiest solutions. Integration appears to matter more to me (as an admin) than to my members...

[GetGamer.com]

GetGamer - don't you already use a custom-type vb cms solution on bigblueball? Why not stick with that? What features are you missing that make you want to go with drupal?

I'm actually using a combination of vB mods and plain ol' HTML. The news articles are actually regular forum posts with a very un-forum-like style applied. Many other sections of the site are really just plain HTML, which was fine when we launched, but it's a PITA to maintain today.

I've done a little development with both Drupal and Joomla on other sites, and will probably go with one of those two for the CMS-side of BigBlueBall (including news, which I'll export from vBulletin).

[El_Muerte]

El_Muerte - why don't you join forces with Drupaltin? They seem to be making inroads into doing it without forking Drupal, and from what I read they are asking for people to come on board. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate what you guys have done with vbdrupal, but forks are just not for me.

Because I know (well believe anyway) that their goal is a lost cause with the current versions of Drupal and vBulletin (see my previous post in this thread).
Drupaltin won't reach the minimum level of integration that I've set for vbDrupal. And even for the most basic integration they need to make certain concessions which I deem unacceptable.
Like I previously said, if it was possible to achieve the integration goals without forking I would have done it already.

[HenrikHansen]

I am planning a new site and am really stuck between Drupal / vb / vb with gars / vb with vbAdynamics / vb with hacks / etc I'd like to stick with vb as I like it so much and know it fairly well... my main concern is which one would be best for a very high traffic site.

I have the same considerations.
I consider to use GARS for reviews, tutorials etc, Dynamics as user pages/blogs and advertisements/classifieds, and Drupal for group pages and a glossary (with wiki features) in which users can add terms, change descriptions etc.

In Drupal you can easily set up which blocks and custom term you want on your (glossary) pages and which user groups have access to change description, roll back versions etc (and a lot lot more).

Articles might be Drupal, Dynamics or GARS (still considering ).

[Razasharp]

I'm actually using a combination of vB mods and plain ol' HTML. The news articles are actually regular forum posts with a very un-forum-like style applied. Many other sections of the site are really just plain HTML, which was fine when we launched, but it's a PITA to maintain today.

I've done a little development with both Drupal and Joomla on other sites, and will probably go with one of those two for the CMS-side of BigBlueBall (including news, which I'll export from vBulletin).

The thing that puts me off Drupal (and I guess other CMS systems too) is that I don't think they are as effecient as vB. In other words it seems that they would need more server power to serve the same number of pages as vB would. Least that's what I am inclinced to believe from what I have read. However on the other hand, there are plenty of big sites out there using it, and version 5 at that (6 has lots of improvements on that end).

I know what you mean regarding maintenance, luckily I won't have many static pages in my new site, so it's not as big a deal for me. However I feel your pain on one of my current sites where there is a lot of static content!! But I don't mind as the offest is one log-in across the site to offer my users a seamless experience.

Because I know (well believe anyway) that their goal is a lost cause with the current versions of Drupal and vBulletin (see my previous post in this thread).
Drupaltin won't reach the minimum level of integration that I've set for vbDrupal. And even for the most basic integration they need to make certain concessions which I deem unacceptable.
Like I previously said, if it was possible to achieve the integration goals without forking I would have done it already.

Ah right - tbh, I don't know what difficulties they face doing it that way. Although I would still suggest that it might be worth getting in touch with them and say hey, we tried it your way and it didn't work, but perhaps it's worth another look now... ? (maybe they have thought of something you hadn't back then?).

I have tried vbdrupal before and liked it but at that time I wasn't that familiar with Drupal, so it put me off a bit (Drupal is no vB.. vB spoils us!). Just out of curiosity - how much additional load does using vbdrupal add? And if I did go with vBdrupal, could I easily revert back? i.e. move my forums back to vB and all Drupal content back to Drupal? (resulting in two seperate DBs) That would make me (and I guess many others) feel better about giving it a go.

I have the same considerations.
I consider to use GARS for reviews, tutorials etc, Dynamics as user pages/blogs and advertisements/classifieds, and Drupal for group pages and a glossary (with wiki features) in which users can add terms, change descriptions etc.

In Drupal you can easily set up which blocks and custom term you want on your (glossary) pages and which user groups have access to change description, roll back versions etc (and a lot lot more).

Articles might be Drupal, Dynamics or GARS (still considering ).

Drupal certainly looks attractive from your perspective - for me too actually - but it would require a lot of time to be invested to get it looking how I want.. even top Drupal sites like 'the onion' don't meet the high standard I would expect for my sites so god knows how long it would take to get that acquainted with it.

I think vB makes things easy for us - the templating system is so flexible and really, in terms of how the site looks, vB is not an obstacle in the slightest.

However for my next site I need more - custom thread fields for one, better RSS feeds, more flexible search and tag urls etc

vB4 will be out too late for this new site, and by that time Drupal will probably be in version 7... and I'm quite sure that 7 million dollar investement will manifest in a lot of improvements too.

Although I hate pushing the vB devs, I really hope they can get some of the things we need now - just to tide us over till then (even if as mini plug-ins)... I am being forced to consider Drupal and I don't really want to

[El_Muerte]

Ah right - tbh, I don't know what difficulties they face doing it that way. Although I would still suggest that it might be worth getting in touch with them and say hey, we tried it your way and it didn't work, but perhaps it's worth another look now... ? (maybe they have thought of something you hadn't back then?).

I'd wish. But because of vBulletin's excessive global variable usage it's a real pain. For example, even though the database object is accessible through $vbulletin->db at various places $db is used. Anyway, this global variable stuff becomes a real issue when you want to keep supporting vbulletin plugins through the system. The way PHP handles global variables also gets in the way.
Anyway, it is possible to provide shared user accounts and even sessions, but you'll break support for drupal hooks or vbulletin plugins.

I have tried vbdrupal before and liked it but at that time I wasn't that familiar with Drupal, so it put me off a bit (Drupal is no vB.. vB spoils us!). Just out of curiosity - how much additional load does using vbdrupal add? And if I did go with vBdrupal, could I easily revert back? i.e. move my forums back to vB and all Drupal content back to Drupal? (resulting in two seperate DBs) That would make me (and I guess many others) feel better about giving it a go.

Moving away from vbDrupal to vBulletin and Drupal is quite easy. It's nothing more than either replacing vbDrupal with Drupal (or simply disabling vbDrupal's extra modules and removing its bootstrapping files). It's moving to vbDrupal from an existing Drupal and vBulletin which is difficult.

vbDrupal's overhead wrt Drupal is quite small. You can expect similar performance (when you use standard Drupal themes, the theme that uses vBulletin's templates is much slower). vbDrupal only uses vBulletin's forum initialization. Drupal performs quite well for guests, and less well for authenticated users (because it can do less page caching).
Using vbDrupal's functionality within vBulletin pages (like showing the Drupal menu and other blocks) does have a larger performance hit. This is because vBulletin has to do it's thing for that page and then vbDrupal has to be loaded.
There is a added bonus when using vbDrupal, since it uses vBulletin's database layer you also get the advantage of it's master/slave functionality.

[Floris]

Congrats, I hope this pushes Drupal to the next level and turns it into an even better product. A lot of big sites like twit.tv and such as using it and give a lot of positive feedback about it.