I would like to upgrade my custom Perl forum scripts into the 21st century. I'll admit right off, that I've been playing a bit with phpBB, since it's available, and found that it's pretty fair right out of the box. And with a few mods added (6, in my case) it's quite good. However, those mods put performance right in the toilet, and it was a real pain getting them all installed & working together.
vBulletin is closer to what I want, but still has a few shortcomings that are important to me. As a background, my forums are super-low-volume (maybe 10-20 posts/day max), and deal mostly with technology & circuit design, so attachments are a key necessity. I've dug around the forums, tried the Admin demo, test posts, etc., but still have some questions. Basically, I want to know if certain options are currently built-in, available as mods, or planned for the next rev.
- Save-as-drafts?... phenomenally useful for my forums, some posts tend to be rather long.
- I'd like to be able to post multiple uploaded attachments anywhere in the post. They should show up in the Preview. Preferably, oversized images get replaced with a smaller version that can be clicked on to view the original.
- I see that threads can be displayed in a "Printable Version", but multi-paged threads end up as multi-print-pages. Except that I did see a link to show 100 posts per page. Can this number be set by the admin, and can it skip the intermediate multi-page display? I.e., click on "Printable Version", and a 10-page thread goes straight to a single printable page.
- I would like to be able to email the same sort of page as the "Printable Version". That is, email the entire text of a thread in a single simplified view. With images, if HTML email is supported.
- Is HTML email supported?
- With forum/thread subscriptions, I get the option of daily or weekly emails. Both options appear to be digests, with only links back to the posts. Is there an option to have each individual post get emailed? Is it possible to send the full text of the post? (Or HTML with images.) I saw nothing in the Admin demo for setting any of this, but, there is a lot to look at in Admin!
- I subscribed to the Suggestions & Feedback forum, but the dropdown menu still says "Subscribe to this forum", and I see nothing in the User CP to edit forum subscriptions. How do I cancel?
Finally, I need to convert my old data to vBulletin. I see there is a converter for many popular formats. My data is in a simple text format, one file per post, such as this (6283.txt):
A "top-level" post that starts a thread has a "REPLY_TO" of 0, posts with images have a few more items. How difficult would it be to modify Impex to deal with this? I am fairly proficient in Perl, but know nothing about php or SQL.
Thanks,
Carl
vBulletin is closer to what I want, but still has a few shortcomings that are important to me. As a background, my forums are super-low-volume (maybe 10-20 posts/day max), and deal mostly with technology & circuit design, so attachments are a key necessity. I've dug around the forums, tried the Admin demo, test posts, etc., but still have some questions. Basically, I want to know if certain options are currently built-in, available as mods, or planned for the next rev.
- Save-as-drafts?... phenomenally useful for my forums, some posts tend to be rather long.
- I'd like to be able to post multiple uploaded attachments anywhere in the post. They should show up in the Preview. Preferably, oversized images get replaced with a smaller version that can be clicked on to view the original.
- I see that threads can be displayed in a "Printable Version", but multi-paged threads end up as multi-print-pages. Except that I did see a link to show 100 posts per page. Can this number be set by the admin, and can it skip the intermediate multi-page display? I.e., click on "Printable Version", and a 10-page thread goes straight to a single printable page.
- I would like to be able to email the same sort of page as the "Printable Version". That is, email the entire text of a thread in a single simplified view. With images, if HTML email is supported.
- Is HTML email supported?
- With forum/thread subscriptions, I get the option of daily or weekly emails. Both options appear to be digests, with only links back to the posts. Is there an option to have each individual post get emailed? Is it possible to send the full text of the post? (Or HTML with images.) I saw nothing in the Admin demo for setting any of this, but, there is a lot to look at in Admin!
- I subscribed to the Suggestions & Feedback forum, but the dropdown menu still says "Subscribe to this forum", and I see nothing in the User CP to edit forum subscriptions. How do I cancel?
Finally, I need to convert my old data to vBulletin. I see there is a converter for many popular formats. My data is in a simple text format, one file per post, such as this (6283.txt):
SUBJECT##Re: Cesium magnetometer
NAME##Carl-NC
EMAIL##[email protected]
DATE##04:12:30:17:08:19:4
REPLY_TO##6282
IP_ADDR##124.63.112.15
BODY##
Sounds like a good idea to me...<P>- Carl
END##
NAME##Carl-NC
EMAIL##[email protected]
DATE##04:12:30:17:08:19:4
REPLY_TO##6282
IP_ADDR##124.63.112.15
BODY##
Sounds like a good idea to me...<P>- Carl
END##
Thanks,
Carl
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