So, some of you know that I own licences for different systems. I consider it a valid research expense and I don't mind shelling out to do proper research for what I really care about. I have current licences for XenForo, IPB and yesterday I picked up a vB licence which means I have an active installation of vB 3, vB 4 and vB 5 to play with. I will get round to the others in time, but vB 3 is what I'm looking at right now.
I'm not going to post screenshots, but I'm going to share my reactions and thoughts to these things as I find them. It may be interesting to someone, it may not, I don't know. All of this is on localhost and I don't really care about performance at this stage. I'm not even going to really touch on the user end so much, because from a user aspect they all seem to be mostly consistent. But if I get time I'll look at it.
Admin Panel
This is the first time I've seen the vB admin panel. Having seen a 3.6 or 3.7 moderation panel, the use of frames doesn't surprise me. Yes, ACTUAL FRAMES. Not even iframes.
My first reaction, though, is fuck, it's ugly. I don't even want to call it utilitarian, because while it is functional, it is ugly. I like beauty in my toys.
There are some interesting things to this though - we have a side menu with a shit-ton of first level options: vBulletin Options, Styles & Templates, Langages & Phrases, FAQ, Notices, Announcements, Forums & Moderators, Calendars, Threads & Posts, Thread Prefixes, Moderation, Attachments, Users, Usergroups, Social Groups, User Infractions, User Profile Fields, User Ranks, User Reputations, User Albums, User Titles, Paid Subscriptions, Avatars, Post Icons, Smilies, Custom BB Codes, RSS Feeds, Scheduled Tasks, Plugins & Products, Statistics & Logs, Maintenance.
Monkey butts, that's a lot of stuff. It intrigues me on a number of levels. Firstly... it does mean that everything most people would want is available out of the box, and presumably maintained up to the same standard as the core. Once you get the core dev out of the way, maintenance should be relatively easy.
I gotta say it does make me pause to reflect on what I want to see as a core feature versus what should be a plugin and I just know that's going to cause trouble, especially if I intend to monetise any of them.
Let's kick off. vBulletin Options has... vBulletin Options as the first menu item, which takes me to a page where I can select from about 40 areas, ranging from 'Turn Your vBulletin On and Off', 'Site Name / URL / Contact Details', through Date and Time Options, Email Options, Social Group Options and so on. In other words, collating all the very generic options pages in one place. Interesting tactic. I don't like it, but it's interesting.[1]
Anyway, lots and lots of pages of settings. Most of them seem fairly straightforward and most of them have mostly similar analogues to SMF and Wedge - if you've cruised through the admin panel and seen any of the generic pages you will have seen this, mostly. Though I will note that their UI is arranged to scroll downwards a lot and have concentrated pages with lots of stuff in, as opposed to more but shorter pages. I'm not intrinsically opposed to lots and lots of options, but there are definitely cases of 'less is more' and anyone who knows me will know I like keeping related functionality together.
Interesting to see that 'Social Bookmarking' is still a feature - back in the days before we had Facebook and Twitter and G+ everywhere, we had Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Google's social bookmarking feature. You can't even make this stuff up. (And yes, vB has it built in, but with built in support for it. This intrigues me, actually. I don't want it in the core but I can see people think it should be.)
Ah, the Style Manager, I've been curious about this for a while. Editing templates in the DB, they said. Safer than using real code, they said.
But DAMN.
Code: [Select]
Code: [Select]
Just... eew. Seriously, I get the idea of a template engine, be that Smarty or TOX-G or whatever. I understand the logic and have in the past recommended it in certain circumstances. But this hellspawn bastardisation of HTML, meta HTML and PHP in line? What the Serious FUCK is this?
The ability to configure basic CSS variables with a *nice* interface (and this is easily the nicest UI I've seen yet in vB 3, though I gotta say, it's not a complete trainwreck) is interesting. I have attached a screenshot. I'm not saying I want it in the core, because I don't, but it is fundamentally an interesting concept.
Then we have the language editor. Given current stuff, this intrigues me too, to see what they've done with it, knowing full well what I'd probably find. The amount of configuration is surprising even for me, especially as I plan to remove most of the configurability of 'key' items out of the language editor. It strikes me as something that is surprisingly low use. The actual language editor part itself is completely as expected, with some nice quirks around searching for languages. The quirk primarily that comes to mind is 'overkill'.
FAQ... oh, this is nice, a built in FAQ editor. What's more interesting is that this is the one way I'd be encouraged to re-add the help tab: by making it entirely configurable. You create items which can have child items again and again, it's all very straightforward really. As many levels as you want, as many siblings in a given level. Then we have the UI. I have seen this in XF and there it looked incongruous. Here... it's oddly in character but still unnecessary.
Every item has a 'display order'. Yup, you put in a number to indicate what position these things should be in. Now, I get that. Internally, that's exactly how it works. You have a number and it indicates position. Except there's no need to show the *user* that. Back in the early 2000s, maybe, but it's definitely a relic of back then. (Note, SMF never showed big ol' lists of display numbers to people even back then.) Everything else is straightforward enough there, though the fact it's showing me the unprocessed code is slightly disturbing (yay for more yucky mashup languages!) but I'll let it slide. It's workable if ugly.
Notices... now this is a feature I haven't seen before, or if I have I haven't made a mental note of it (though I believe XF has something similar, I just never dug in enough). A Notice, essentially, is a block of code shown at the top of the page based on matching conditions, e.g. show a given block if the user is/isn't a given group, is in a given board/its sub-boards, using a given style, user has not visited lately, user has between x and y posts, user has no posts, user has given amount of reputation, infractions, PM storage, username... the list goes on. Pretty much anything you can conveniently imagine would cover it, I think.
Now this is an interesting concept for me. It means you could put ads in it if you so desired, sure, but you could also do so much more with it. One admin I know uses this to handle birthday wishes to his users (since there's a notice for when it's their birthday), to the point where I'd probably want to put it in the core rather than rely on it being a plugin, even if I wrote it. It's sufficiently useful, I think, that it could justify itself.
Announcements - a similar idea but intended to be shortlived rather than general notices. The idea is that you get what amounts to a posting box, a start and an end date and some minor formatting options and get to display notices like that. It's an interesting idea for quick notifications that have higher prominence than pinned topics and that will automatically fade away later on - and don't allow for comments.
Then we get to the Forum Manager - remember, vB calls them forums not boards. Yay for Display Order number boxes. This is intriguing... we have some of the typical stuff - title, description, redirection, default sort order[2] and there's some stuff I wouldn't have thought of.
You can add a list of email addresses to notify when there's a new post or topic in that board. You can also, from main board configuration, turn on post/thread/attachment moderation right there. Interesting. I won't be changing our moderation filters any time soon but it is interesting.
Interesting what other things are set - you can disable bbcode/smileys/img bbc/post icons etc all by board. I find this fascinating that you have this much control - and mostly unnecessary. I have yet to encounter a situation where I'd want one board to have these and not another.
Permissions, ah how we love thee. Wait... you can remove admins' permissions in a board? Seriously? (Actually, that's an interesting concept. I know cases where users have asked about it for specific and unusual reasons.)
Other than that the approach seems to be reasonably sane - set defaults per user group then let them either use the default or set by board. Hell to manage on larger configurations with many boards of course (which is why SMF went to board profiles in the first place).
Calendar... not really a great amount to say, looks like much the same as I'd envisaged our calendar becoming really.
Threads and Posts... lots of loving pruning (first/last post min/max days ago, min/max replies, min/max views, include/ignore pinned topics, include/ignore unapproved/deleted/locked/redirect) or even base it on who made the topic, what the topic's title is, what board(s) in question... it's very thorough, but like other things perhaps too thorough. I get the feeling it's a bit like they put everything they could think of in, good idea or not. There's also move topics between boards, same criteria. Plus you can... remove the poll on a topic if you know it's id? Then we have who voted what, and interestingly enough to prune edit history. Edit history is a core feature, interesting.
Thread prefixes... interesting idea. I can see the use for this in some contexts and some kinds of sites, not sure I'd want it as a core feature but for those who would use it, it is often a make or break feature. The features do not surprise me particularly, the only thing that does is the fact is demands people provide both plain text (for old fashioned dropdowns) and rich text displays.
Bah, soon be time for bed and so much more to explore. More when I've been to bed.
I'm not going to post screenshots, but I'm going to share my reactions and thoughts to these things as I find them. It may be interesting to someone, it may not, I don't know. All of this is on localhost and I don't really care about performance at this stage. I'm not even going to really touch on the user end so much, because from a user aspect they all seem to be mostly consistent. But if I get time I'll look at it.
Admin Panel
This is the first time I've seen the vB admin panel. Having seen a 3.6 or 3.7 moderation panel, the use of frames doesn't surprise me. Yes, ACTUAL FRAMES. Not even iframes.
My first reaction, though, is fuck, it's ugly. I don't even want to call it utilitarian, because while it is functional, it is ugly. I like beauty in my toys.
There are some interesting things to this though - we have a side menu with a shit-ton of first level options: vBulletin Options, Styles & Templates, Langages & Phrases, FAQ, Notices, Announcements, Forums & Moderators, Calendars, Threads & Posts, Thread Prefixes, Moderation, Attachments, Users, Usergroups, Social Groups, User Infractions, User Profile Fields, User Ranks, User Reputations, User Albums, User Titles, Paid Subscriptions, Avatars, Post Icons, Smilies, Custom BB Codes, RSS Feeds, Scheduled Tasks, Plugins & Products, Statistics & Logs, Maintenance.
Monkey butts, that's a lot of stuff. It intrigues me on a number of levels. Firstly... it does mean that everything most people would want is available out of the box, and presumably maintained up to the same standard as the core. Once you get the core dev out of the way, maintenance should be relatively easy.
I gotta say it does make me pause to reflect on what I want to see as a core feature versus what should be a plugin and I just know that's going to cause trouble, especially if I intend to monetise any of them.
Let's kick off. vBulletin Options has... vBulletin Options as the first menu item, which takes me to a page where I can select from about 40 areas, ranging from 'Turn Your vBulletin On and Off', 'Site Name / URL / Contact Details', through Date and Time Options, Email Options, Social Group Options and so on. In other words, collating all the very generic options pages in one place. Interesting tactic. I don't like it, but it's interesting.[1]
Anyway, lots and lots of pages of settings. Most of them seem fairly straightforward and most of them have mostly similar analogues to SMF and Wedge - if you've cruised through the admin panel and seen any of the generic pages you will have seen this, mostly. Though I will note that their UI is arranged to scroll downwards a lot and have concentrated pages with lots of stuff in, as opposed to more but shorter pages. I'm not intrinsically opposed to lots and lots of options, but there are definitely cases of 'less is more' and anyone who knows me will know I like keeping related functionality together.
Interesting to see that 'Social Bookmarking' is still a feature - back in the days before we had Facebook and Twitter and G+ everywhere, we had Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Google's social bookmarking feature. You can't even make this stuff up. (And yes, vB has it built in, but with built in support for it. This intrigues me, actually. I don't want it in the core but I can see people think it should be.)
Ah, the Style Manager, I've been curious about this for a while. Editing templates in the DB, they said. Safer than using real code, they said.
But DAMN.
$template_hook[postbit_start]
<table class="tborder" id="post$post[postid]" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center">
<div id="postmenu_$post[postid]">
<if condition="$show['profile']">
<a class="bigusername" href="member.php?$session[sessionurl]u=$post[userid]">$post[musername]</a>
$post[onlinestatus]
<script type="text/javascript"> vbmenu_register("postmenu_$post[postid]", true); </script>
<else />
$post[musername]
</if>
</div>
Just... eew. Seriously, I get the idea of a template engine, be that Smarty or TOX-G or whatever. I understand the logic and have in the past recommended it in certain circumstances. But this hellspawn bastardisation of HTML, meta HTML and PHP in line? What the Serious FUCK is this?
The ability to configure basic CSS variables with a *nice* interface (and this is easily the nicest UI I've seen yet in vB 3, though I gotta say, it's not a complete trainwreck) is interesting. I have attached a screenshot. I'm not saying I want it in the core, because I don't, but it is fundamentally an interesting concept.
Then we have the language editor. Given current stuff, this intrigues me too, to see what they've done with it, knowing full well what I'd probably find. The amount of configuration is surprising even for me, especially as I plan to remove most of the configurability of 'key' items out of the language editor. It strikes me as something that is surprisingly low use. The actual language editor part itself is completely as expected, with some nice quirks around searching for languages. The quirk primarily that comes to mind is 'overkill'.
FAQ... oh, this is nice, a built in FAQ editor. What's more interesting is that this is the one way I'd be encouraged to re-add the help tab: by making it entirely configurable. You create items which can have child items again and again, it's all very straightforward really. As many levels as you want, as many siblings in a given level. Then we have the UI. I have seen this in XF and there it looked incongruous. Here... it's oddly in character but still unnecessary.
Every item has a 'display order'. Yup, you put in a number to indicate what position these things should be in. Now, I get that. Internally, that's exactly how it works. You have a number and it indicates position. Except there's no need to show the *user* that. Back in the early 2000s, maybe, but it's definitely a relic of back then. (Note, SMF never showed big ol' lists of display numbers to people even back then.) Everything else is straightforward enough there, though the fact it's showing me the unprocessed code is slightly disturbing (yay for more yucky mashup languages!) but I'll let it slide. It's workable if ugly.
Notices... now this is a feature I haven't seen before, or if I have I haven't made a mental note of it (though I believe XF has something similar, I just never dug in enough). A Notice, essentially, is a block of code shown at the top of the page based on matching conditions, e.g. show a given block if the user is/isn't a given group, is in a given board/its sub-boards, using a given style, user has not visited lately, user has between x and y posts, user has no posts, user has given amount of reputation, infractions, PM storage, username... the list goes on. Pretty much anything you can conveniently imagine would cover it, I think.
Now this is an interesting concept for me. It means you could put ads in it if you so desired, sure, but you could also do so much more with it. One admin I know uses this to handle birthday wishes to his users (since there's a notice for when it's their birthday), to the point where I'd probably want to put it in the core rather than rely on it being a plugin, even if I wrote it. It's sufficiently useful, I think, that it could justify itself.
Announcements - a similar idea but intended to be shortlived rather than general notices. The idea is that you get what amounts to a posting box, a start and an end date and some minor formatting options and get to display notices like that. It's an interesting idea for quick notifications that have higher prominence than pinned topics and that will automatically fade away later on - and don't allow for comments.
Then we get to the Forum Manager - remember, vB calls them forums not boards. Yay for Display Order number boxes. This is intriguing... we have some of the typical stuff - title, description, redirection, default sort order[2] and there's some stuff I wouldn't have thought of.
You can add a list of email addresses to notify when there's a new post or topic in that board. You can also, from main board configuration, turn on post/thread/attachment moderation right there. Interesting. I won't be changing our moderation filters any time soon but it is interesting.
Interesting what other things are set - you can disable bbcode/smileys/img bbc/post icons etc all by board. I find this fascinating that you have this much control - and mostly unnecessary. I have yet to encounter a situation where I'd want one board to have these and not another.
Permissions, ah how we love thee. Wait... you can remove admins' permissions in a board? Seriously? (Actually, that's an interesting concept. I know cases where users have asked about it for specific and unusual reasons.)
Other than that the approach seems to be reasonably sane - set defaults per user group then let them either use the default or set by board. Hell to manage on larger configurations with many boards of course (which is why SMF went to board profiles in the first place).
Calendar... not really a great amount to say, looks like much the same as I'd envisaged our calendar becoming really.
Threads and Posts... lots of loving pruning (first/last post min/max days ago, min/max replies, min/max views, include/ignore pinned topics, include/ignore unapproved/deleted/locked/redirect) or even base it on who made the topic, what the topic's title is, what board(s) in question... it's very thorough, but like other things perhaps too thorough. I get the feeling it's a bit like they put everything they could think of in, good idea or not. There's also move topics between boards, same criteria. Plus you can... remove the poll on a topic if you know it's id? Then we have who voted what, and interestingly enough to prune edit history. Edit history is a core feature, interesting.
Thread prefixes... interesting idea. I can see the use for this in some contexts and some kinds of sites, not sure I'd want it as a core feature but for those who would use it, it is often a make or break feature. The features do not surprise me particularly, the only thing that does is the fact is demands people provide both plain text (for old fashioned dropdowns) and rich text displays.
Bah, soon be time for bed and so much more to explore. More when I've been to bed.
1. | I don't want to derail myself but a very vivid thought here is the similarity to how XenForo arranges itself much the same, and I suspect Kier was largely responsible. |
2. | Did I actually make a UI item for that already? I don't think I did :/ |