As some of you know I bought a site database. The site vBnt.net was a vbulletin site and is no longer online. I was going to convert it to IPB. Problem was it wouldn’t convert. I have done my share of vbulletin to IPB conversions, over 20 in fact, for myself and clients and this is the first time I could not work through the conversion issues so I just upgraded to the latest stable release of vbulletin, version 4.1.1.

What I have found so far. vBulletin is a far inferior product. There is just so much wrong with it compared to IPB I don’t know where to start.

First lets look at the style editor and the vbulletin stylevars. The vbulletin style editor is old, very old in fact. When you edit a template the complete page refreshes and you are brought back to the template editor main page. If you make a mistake and the site doesn’t render correctly you have to find your spot to correct the problem. Not any easy task.

Now lets look at IPB template editor. You want to change the width of the site you open the main css file in the editor. Find the place to change, change it and commit the change. Notice how you get an ajax refresh and you stayed on the exact area of the edit. So when you check the site in a new windows if it doesn’t look right you can easily and quickly undo the edit.

Win for IPB.

Now lets look at SEO. Both vbulletin and IPB have SE friendly url’s. The vbulletin url’s take more to get working correctly and do not 301 same content. IPB url’s 301 exact content so you won’t be penalized for duplicate content. Unless you use vbseo vbulletin can not compare with IPB out of the box as far as SEO goes.

Without vbseo win for IPB.
With vbseo win for vBulletin.

There are other things that make IPB hands down the winner over vbulletin and it would take me a long time to point them out. Let me just say that I gave vbulletin another chance and after 2 years of development for the 4.0 branch it is still going backwards. In the same time IPB has set the bar extremely high by improving at every turn.

Now I have to convert the new site to IPB and this is the last time I will speak on vbulletin unless they absolutely blow my socks off in the future which is highly unlikely.