Ready to 
vBulletin’s blog system
Matt Lincoln Russell
January 7, 2009 2:33 PM ET in Tech
Icrontic uses vBulletin’s Blog product for its member blogs (well, for now it does). Since the editing staff is off to CES, I thought I’d sneak in with a short story about my experience with it.
I’m poking around in vBulletin because I want to change what it looks like. It’s damned hideous by default: a blue stripe down the left of posts? Usernames in each post twice? Are you kidding me, Jelsoft? They crammed their avatar into the post like it’s relevant to the content and then put a dotted border around them like some kind of retarded Victorian portrait. The vBulletin team has done all this and more for your viewing pleasure.
I open up the list of blog templates in the admin control panel, and there are around 50 templates in there. Again, the entire Wordpress system has about 15. That’s total. For Wordpress, not some lackluster forum plugin.
Alright, so I want to change what posts look like. I go off searching through the list of insipidly-named templates. Hmm, maybe it’s blog_home_list_blog. Of course, I have no way of identifying it when I open it – it’s all tables and poorly-named variables. Nope, that doesn’t look like it. Maybe blog_show_entry? blog_entry_external? No no wait, maybe blog_blog_row, that could be it. Or blog_list_blogs_all. Or blog_list_blogs_best. Or blog_list_blogs_blog. That sounds like a winner! Hell, I know, how about I spend my night clicking through all 50 templates? That’d be fun.
I actually think vBulletin developers sit around and snicker about the black morass they’ve trapped all their developers in, partying like its 1999 in their nested tables. No one even KNOWS about half the options in the blogs because they’re so walled off behind layer after layer of crap. I need a doctorate in vBulletin to explain to our members how to get anything done in this morass, let alone try to constructively do anything with it myself.
Patience please, members of Icrontic. The blogs are a great idea. I just have to write an import script to migrate us to Wordpress MU now.
vBulletin: ultimate power and control… if only you can find the #$&%ing button.
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