vBulletin to WordPress bbpress / buddypress – Part 1

Ok, This is going to be a long post.

The aim here is to move a, working and reasonably popular, Vbulletin forum onto WordPress running BBpress and Buddypress.

The main reason for this move is Vbulletin just isn’t capable in some areas to be a modern social platform. There are a couple of plugins available that try to fix this such as vbsocial and its also possible to use a bridge between vBulletin and WordPress such as the one by Vbsocial or VBSSO however these lack some of the features i would like to have. such as

• Showing my vbulletin forum activity in the Buddypress activity wall.
• A good image management solution allowing well structured albums and simple ways to add these to posts etc
• Proper WordPress integration so that i can use wordpress plugins such as Woocommerce or in this specific case build a directory of studios that can be managed by users who can then interact easily on the forum.

There are many other reasons too, little niggles that just irritate me about vbulletin but the end game here is a new site which does the following

• Forum for discussions in a normal (I mean not wall based social interaction) style forum layout. Forums hierarchy, threads, replies, tags, etc. All forum activity to show in the activity feed.
• Social interactions – people can friend each other. post their own “walls” to show individual generic activity,  comment on new posts, activity, comments, images, albums easily and have all of this activity show up well in the overall activity feed.
• A solid image management system where people can upload their images and post images inline to their own activity wall, threads / posts in the forum, link to them from other sites / embed easily, and generally have a solid way to add images make albums and have general portfolio style image galleries that look good and are simple to use.
• Good spam catching facilities. I am using stopforumspam on the vBulletin forum and need at the very least something similar to this for the new site. I would like improvements for removal of spam posts by users who have joined and sent any type of spam or created spammy galleries
• Good moderation by roles. I have a lot of active mods on the forum. being able to grant moderation capabilities to different user roles is important.
• Current forum setup maintained with all users etc transferred to the new platform with as little disruption as possible.

So off we go,