vBulletin CMS vs. Joomla?

[Cort]

It depends on what you want. I opened up Vbulletin about six months after someone opened up a NING site for the same community. We were the first two with effective communication packages. He told me 'Forums are dead!' (and I believed him). My vBulletin site, with all its CMS flaws, has received far more traffic than his. I estimate he gets maybe 20-30 posts a day. I get 3-400. There is no easier way for community members to communicate than with a good Forum package. If what you want to do is engage your members in communication go with VB and watch the CMS package develop or create a bridge.

[feldon23]

For most hobbyist sites, I agree 100% on Wordpress for that purpose. Does it really matter if your frontpage can share user accounts/login credentials with your forum? Not if you are just making a blog/splash/news page.

[djones44]

Vb is a given if you need a forum. We're talking about the rest of your website. And WordPress is best for that.

[feldon23]

Funny I think Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are all pretty awful. I can't imagine using Joomla ever again it has such a horrible backend, used it since mambo 0.8 and always hated it

The Joomla backend has a lot of problems, namely the Section->Category->Item dogma and the Menu system. But all that changes in Joomla 1.6.

Not sure why you think Wordpress is awful. They kept the core extremely simple so plugins would be easy to write. I love Wordpress at this point, although I wish there was a button to turn off all the smart code cleanup in the Editor.

[InfoNirvana]

If you want to run Joomla as your CMS and vBulletin as your forums ... Jfusion will allow you a single sign on.

[kmohamed]

word-press vs vb cms ?

first in term of $$$ of course = word-press
in term of design and efficiency = word-press
however if you are looking for great blog, forum, and articles integration of course vb is the best it has great member system
the cms only been out for 4 months they are planing to expand it

if you want my advise if you are planing to have a big community choice vb otherwise word-press
joomla is awful don't even think about it

[djones44]

I agree that CMS is a cheap joke, and wasted money there as well. Now I have to redo it all with the Forum as the root. Might sell it instead. WordPress is head and shoulders above all of this.

[Visualbrother]

Funny I think Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal are all pretty awfull. After almost 4 years of Vivvo developers license I can't imagine using Joomla ever again it has such a horrible backend, used it since mambo 0.8 and always hated it. So many crap plugins, even the 30+ commercial ones I got suck in many ways. But yeah Rocket Theme has some really nice stuff that I can't imagine doing on VB. No problem with Vivvo though, as far as I'm concerned that has the best template system. The VB CMS lol... what a shocker, even if they just copied some of the rubbish ideas from joomla it would have been 100% improvement. Never should have bought 4 licenses without trying it first.. oh well the things we do. Now I wait for Vivvo to catch up with 4.0 or VB to start stealing better ideas for their cms backend.

[Off_Topic]

Wordpress is easy to customize, has thousands of themes, has great plugins, I just cannot recommend it enough. If you work at it for a day or two, you can shake off that very obvious "blog" look with some clever CSS work. Its only shortcoming is the user control is better than Joomla but not as good as vBulletin.

I am in the exact same boat. I love Wordpress. It's ease of use is amazing. It's customization is so easy also. The documentation is very very very very good. We're currently in the process of creating an "up to date" Wordpress bridge for vB. We'll probably release it also.

(Wordpress > Joomla) > vB :P

[feldon23]

I wrote a post, but I think I forgot to hit submit.

Anyway, one thing I will say about Wordpress, is that Google takes the "Month links" too seriously. Somehow, Google views your month-by-month links (which are default in Wordpress) as a site map and that is how your articles are indexed in Google.

However I find this rather useless, so I will be either deleting or de-emphasizing these links and instead using a Google Site Map to direct it to index my site by Category.

But otherwise I have very good PageRank and no problem appearing in Google.

[TheBish]

Please read here for how Google, or Matt Cutts at least, views wordpress.

http://www.howtomakemyblog.com/seo/googles-matt-cutts-wordpress-the-best-blogging-platform-for-seo/

Edit... there are plenty of articles out there. I just chose this one. You can also watch Matt Cutts video opinions on YT.

[surfdude]

I was given to understand that Google does not give good ranking to Wordpress-based sites, but maybe that's changed. Anybody got a contrary viewpoint (with links to supporting references)?

Any supporting evidence for Google/Wordpress claim? I just started using Wordpress for one of my sites still in works (SmileArtStudio)and was pleasantly surprised how easy it is to use but being so new I have no idea how Google friendly it is.

I am keeping close eye on Joomla as I like what RocketTheme outfit and others are doing with it. But in order to use it it would have to have good bridge to a forum software.

I am waiting for dust to settle on vB4 but for CMS part I always relied on vBadvanced (free) as well as for links directory. Example of vBadvanced custom page see Surf Newquay - Fistral Beach page.

[HydraulicJack]

If your website is maintained by just 2-3 content authors, admins, etc. then you may very well be able to build the front-end of your website entirely in Wordpress.

I was given to understand that Google does not give good ranking to Wordpress-based sites, but maybe that's changed. Anybody got a contrary viewpoint (with links to supporting references)?

...If you need a multi-user site, then Joomla is still not there yet, but I am watching Joomla 1.6 very closely.

Yeah is anybody - or will anybody you know with sufficient skills be - creating a robust bridge between Joomla 1.6 and vB 4.x.x?

Joomla and Drupal are both mature CMS and vBulletin has a steep curve to try to catch up. I don't envy them.

I agree. It seems to me that vB's designs and layouts (and weakness re: use of a full, dynamic color palette) are several generations behind what is out there in Drupal and Joomla.

[feldon23]

If your website is maintained by just 2-3 content authors, admins, etc. then you may very well be able to build the front-end of your website entirely in Wordpress.

Wordpress is easy to customize, has thousands of themes, has great plugins, I just cannot recommend it enough. If you work at it for a day or two, you can shake off that very obvious "blog" look with some clever CSS work. Its only shortcoming is the user control is better than Joomla but not as good as vBulletin.

Joomla is currently in transition. It has managed to succeed, despite having extremely limited user access control. I think the sky is the limit for Joomla with version 1.6, which will fully implement usergroups, limiting usergroups to editing, authoring, and approving content at a category and story level. If you need a multi-user site, then Joomla is still not there yet, but I am watching Joomla 1.6 very closely.

Joomla and Drupal are both mature CMS and vBulletin has a steep curve to try to catch up. I don't envy them.

[MCNX]

At the moment, in my modest opinion, Joomla is for CMS and VB is for forums.