Consider switching from Drupal to vBulletin CMS, have a few questions

محروم.كوم · #1 02-14-2010, 02:30 AM

I work for a small web dev and design company and we just started a new project about a month ago. We work in drupal but after looking over the new vbulletin cms demo and being impressed with what we saw we are thinking of switching to it. I have some questions I would appreciate if you could answer to help us decide if vbulletin would be suitable for our project.

Firstly, the project we are working on is a subsciption based website that provides training videos for a particular field. We need full social networking (user profiles, user created groups, user photo galleries, friends list, comments on user profiles), blogs, subscription payment handling, video handling capabilities.

1. Can vBulletin CMS handle video streaming? An example of what we are looking for would be like on this site that provides training videos for online poker - http://www.deucescracked.com/videos/1591-Episode-Two

2. We want to allow anybody to register on our site to use the forums. However, we want to limit the people who can watch the training videos and create user profiles/blogs to people who have paid a subscription fee. Can vBulletin handle this situation where there are two user groups - a standard user who can just use the forums, and a premium user who can use the forums, create a profile and blog, and watch streaming videos?

3. Can vBulletin CMS handle a subscription sign up option that lets users choose between signing up for a monthly subscription, a 6 month subscription and a 12 month subscription?

4. This is a pet peeve of mine lol. I see in vBulletin 4 the Threads/Posts and Replies/Views columns have been removed and they are now displayed in a single column, one under the other like so:

Replies: 151
Views: 954

I am not a fan of this as i prefer the way vBulletin 3.x gives more emphasis to the Replies and Views by placing them in their own separate columns. So does VB 4 contain an option to revert this back to the 3.x style?

5. One of my workmates purchased a vBulletin 4.0 forum license just yesterday to test out the forum software and compare it to drupal. If we decide to switch from Drupal to vBulletin CMS would it be possible to upgrade this to a full publishing suite license and also to add on a 6 month support license?

Cheers. __DEFINE_LIKE_SHARE__