Which software?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Harvey Raybould on January 8, 2010 at 15:26

Hi Gerald

Thank you for starting this new group. I have only ever had any real experience of Vbulletin, which is a commercial (paid for) forum system. It is currently around £130. It is a system that is used by alot of the very large forums on the web and is very well respected and established.

The great thing with Vbulletin, is the SEO functionality, search engine friendly URL's etc so the whole site is indexable by Google. This is great if you have a very busy web site as the content is constantly changing, which as you know the search engines love.

v4 has even more facilities now, so it is not just a forum anymore, Photo Albums, Groups, Calendars, Events Management, Polls, etc so it is evolving into a community system. There is also another version which includes CMS, Blogs etc

If you are interested the URL is - http://www.vbulletin.com

Regards

Harvey

Permalink Reply by Gerald Hornsby on January 8, 2010 at 18:20

Hi Harvey

Thanks. I was going to mention vBulletin, as it's probably the most popular paid-for forum software around. I would guess it's getting like phpNuke, with huge expansion through bolt-on goodies.

I think you're right in calling it a "Community System" - a bit like the "Exchange" software you're using here. I'm on a local community site, created on http://www.ning.com/ - it's a good system, and great for small communities.

Gerald