[Meego-community] Forum engine decision: vBulletin

Wed Mar 17 15:19:11 CDT 2010

Hi,

The still unofficial Community working group members Dawn Foster, Quim Gil, Mike Shaver and Tero Kojo had a call right now to decide on the forum engine to be deployed. The decision has been to go for vBulletin integrated with Drupal, with Reggie Suplido appointed to lead the implementation.

The reasons for the decision are the proven track of vBulletin and Reggie with http://talk.maemo.org . The integration of Drupal and vBulletin fulfills the Single Sign-on requirement and looks good from a technical and resourcing point of view. The proprietary license is considered a negative aspect but not a blocker or a major factor considering the practical situation with the open source alternatives at hand.

phpBB has been considerd to be overall on par from a technical point of view, and the open license made it more attractive. However, there has been an uncertainty about who would be able to lead and execute the work. Calum Lind has done a great job promoting this option but due to personal reasons he can't commit right now to work on this. Somehow it was felt that we didn't have the critical mass of supporters contributors we seem to have around vBulletin.

Drupal's advanced forum has been also considered and from a sysadmin point of view was considered the most desirable since it would save us an extra web service to maintain. However, as for today the feature set is not as complete as a specialized tool. That is ok for small/medium forums, but for big ones a Drupal forum might fall short. Considering the activity of talk.maemo.org, we have good reasons to think that the MeeGo forum has many chances to grow big and demand the features expected in a real web forum.

We didn't discuss other options.

Therefore we will start with vBulletin and Reggie. If at some point of time someone has a proposal for a better plan including the migration we will be open to discuss it.

Thank you very much for the fruitful discussion and work done at http://wiki.meego.com/Forum_/_Talk ! A vBulletin implementation lead by Reggie had been actually assumed after the first MeeGo Community meeting. Even if now we have reached the same conclusion we believe the extra debate has been useful to consolidate and explain the decision.

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Quim Gil on behalf of the Community pre-working-group