[mrmacmac]

Hi there… I’m a vBulletin veteran, but am considering a switch over to bbPress to use in tandom with wordpress. Can anyone out there tell me the advantages of using bbPress compared to vBulletin? Is it just as powerful? Does it tie into WordPress seemlessly?

I also need to know if some features I require are available in bbPress… Here is my shortlist:

– Ability to act as forums admin (edit everything)

– Ability to add moderators to specific forums

– Custom avatars and signatures for users?

– Spam and ‘bad word’ filters?

– Private email/messaging system?

– Can I create categories/subcategories?

– Can I create little thumbnails for these categories?

There’s more but that’s a short list… Any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated

[chrishajer]

http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/bbPress+vBulletin

[Nola1974]

that matrix seems to be fairly outdated as many of the items are blank when they should be ‘yes’ or at least ‘plugin’ for bbpress.

[_ck_]

You can’t compare one of the most popular commercial forum programs with 7 years of development and thousands of ($$$) extensions to a fairly new open source project that’s not even a 1.0 release yet.

If you are running a small non-commercial forum, vbulletin is too much. If you are running a large forum that needs many powerful features, bbPress (currently) is too little.

Virtually all of the features you are asking for are possible on bbPress, with a bit of work and sweat. None of them are available without 3rd party plugins, some of which are not complete or bug-free.