vBAdvanced or vBPortal

[Zachery]

I am going to now close this thread.

Thank you to both the vBa and vBp staff who kept the thread ontopic and to the members who provided their honest feedback

[Arkham]

vBadvanced CMPS (http://www.vbadvanced.com) is free to all licensed vBulletin license owners. vBPortal is "free" with purchase of a Premium Membership on the vBPortal site (http://www.vbportal.com) and then (last time I checked) $20/year renewal.

VBPortal is $25 for the first-time purchase of a premium membership, and $20/yr thereafter. Wajones just cleared that up for me a couple weeks ago. It's still a steal for what you get.

[Zenith]

I've tested both extensively and vBPortal is far more powerful. As many others have said in this thread, it will depend a lot on the complexity you want in your site as to which product is better for your application. I think you could boil it down to if your forum is 90% of the focus of your site then stick with the simplicity of vBAdvanced... if you want a true portal then go vBPortal.

[KW802]

do vb portal and vb advanced cost something?

vBadvanced CMPS (http://www.vbadvanced.com) is free to all licensed vBulletin license owners. vBPortal is "free" with purchase of a Premium Membership on the vBPortal site (http://www.vbportal.com) and then (last time I checked) $20/year renewal. If I recall correctly you can also get vBPortal by purchasing some of the major products (eg: vBulletin or Photopost) through them as they then give you a membership subscription for purchasing through them.

[hollyboy]

do vb portal and vb advanced cost something?

[Booth]

VBAdvanced is very limited compared to VBportal. I've been using VBportal for less than a week now and its flexibility is fantastic. If they could just get better links and downloads pages 'out of the box' it'd be a winner and the best portal that I've actually used (Xoops, Mambo etc)

[ShadyNight]

Thing is, vBa IS a great hack, if you have the time, don't mind re-doing the files each time you upgrade vB AND if you enjoy doing your front page in HTML. It's an extremly easy thing to get the hang of, and wonderful for those who know HTML. BUT it takes fiddling like there is no tommorow!

When I used vBa, I would copy the index section into a secondary program so I wouldn't have to subject my users to the screwups, if I forgot a closing tag or some other part of the HTML that would make the whole thing break. And sure it was easy to add "blocks" and what not, but again, it meant copying it all to a secondary program, finding the section I wanted it above or below, and then previwing to make sure I got it right, and IF I was lucky and got it right right of the first go, I would have to reload my admin cp (I have a low time out for a reason) sign back in, find the dang template, paste in the new one, and there we go.

vbPortal? NO re adding files each vB upgrade, no file hacking, nothing like that. SURE it takes a little to get use to the layout, but once you have the hang on it? Pftt all you have to do to change your layout or add a new block is one or two clicks, NO copy and pasting, just one click, paste infor for new block, one click saved, one click activate AND number where I want it, save and done! Takes me about an EIGTH of the time to setup a new block or change the current blocks.

IF I get sick of a particular block or module? just deactivate it. No need to go in and change templates or remove a hack, just one click, inactive, save and done!

Nope, I probably won't change any vBa users minds, but I have to say, my mind is set, vbPortal is the best in my mind, and has the most options built in, not hacked on.

*hugs her vBportal*

[kcikees]

u need to install vba and about 5 or 6 other hacks to mimic vbportal

and then you're still not even close

[Zonex]

why compare them?
they are 2 totally different things
one is a homepage the other is a module system with a lot more features

u need to install vba and about 5 or 6 other hacks to mimic vbportal

[kcikees]

Hi, i tryed both of thme and spend my Money to vbPortal to try it out.

All i can say is - Money isn´t everything and vbAdvanced rules !

The only thing where vbPortal is better for me is the simple Integration of third parties RSS Feeds in Blocks. But hey - you can do it by yourself at VBA in less than 2 Minutes. So better think before you buy a giant Hack (vbPortal) and get GIANT Problems with a slowly and agressiv Supportteam.

So - i have voted for VBA !

(Sorry for my bad English ..... )

State your domain if you want to play an honest game here!!

I'll bet this domain is not listed in the legal owners list of vBP.

With a statement like yours the vBP team deserves it to know, if you don't post it, most of us will know that you just talked crap!!

SHOW US YOUR DOMAIN

[redlabour]

Hi, i tryed both of thme and spend my Money to vbPortal to try it out.

All i can say is - Money isn´t everything and vbAdvanced rules !

The only thing where vbPortal is better for me is the simple Integration of third parties RSS Feeds in Blocks. But hey - you can do it by yourself at VBA in less than 2 Minutes. So better think before you buy a giant Hack (vbPortal) and get GIANT Problems with a slowly and agressiv Supportteam.

So - i have voted for VBA !

(Sorry for my bad English ..... )

[morrow]

Great thread.

My site is, http://www.njflyfishing.com. As of around December, I switched from VBPortal to VBA. I was upgrading Vbulletin 235 or something like that to 3.03 so I figured I'd try something different.

VBA is nice, but I honestly can't say it compares to VBP, and that's the old version of VBP I'm comparing to the newest version of VBA.

A few things that vba doesn't offer, as far as I can tell... Stats. Yes, there are hacks for stats available at vbulletin.org, but this is included with vbportal. Another thing... I was able to have other websites come up as my center block via a vbp module. I asked if this was possible with Vba, on the Vba website and 1 person was nice enough to respond to tell me that he thought it might be possible, but he wasn't sure how. This function is very important to me. The 'reviews' module was nice to have, as was the classifieds module. The admin control panel was also much more intuitive than the anything else I've seen.

One of the problems with VBPortal was that I couldn't alphabetize the options under the Main Menu. That looks to not be an issue anymore.

I just repaid my subscription to VBP, and plan on installing it again. I like it much more than VBA, but that's just me.

VBA is a good system with low overhead. I think it's good for someone looking for something simple (although the installation takes some time). If you're looking for an easy to use, easy to manage, CMS, I would go with VBP. My skill level is probably somewhere in the middle of the pack. I'm not a pro coder nor am I an idiot (well, maybe sometimes I can be an idiot).

I can't wait to get VBP back up and running. I hope it's not too much of a pain to uninstall VBA.

By the way, I made a mistake with my vote and accidentally voted for VBAdvanced. Please change my vote to VBPortal.

[ShadyNight]

Correct. vBa CMPS is a free product (the only requirement is that the person downloading the script is a licensed vBulletin customer) and vBa Links & vBa Gallery are commercial products.

Sorry LOL It suppose to be my attempt at humour. Apparently I have not graduated to that stage yet.
It was stated that "the support I get from VBAdvanced is well worth the money", well I hear that used ALL the time when knocking something if it's free. *shrugs* Like I said, a poor attempt at humour.

Correct, you need to make some minor changes to a few of the files. But you don't need to mess around with your styles.

Don't have to mess with the styles with vbPortal either! UNLESS you want to. I'm not saying vBa is bad or anything. I just happen to prefer vbPortal over it because I do NOT have to hack any files. I have enough hacks I have to re-do each time I upgrade vBulletin, no need to add my portal to that list!!
Plus add to the fact I am debating about narrowing my hacks down even farther to JUST the minor esthetics stuff ... the vbPortal is wonderful for that. No need to hack it back in. just pftt install and forget about it.

.... as people do for other products in return.

Yeppers. Didn't say they couldn't. LOL Like I have any chance of stopping them?

[Vtec44]

Correct, you need to make some minor changes to a few of the files. But you don't need to mess around with your styles.

Amen to that! It intergrates seemlessly with all the styles, and you only have to do minor modification ONCE. IF someone like me, who is still learning how to use VB, can do it then everyone should be able to use it with ease.

[Arkham]

Just an FYI.... the three vBadvanced products (CMPS, Links, & Gallery) are independent of each other so you can run Links by itself. So, in this case, yes, you can run vBa Links with vB Portal or any other portal package that you may be looking at.

Yep, I know, but I prefer the ground-up integration with CMPS.