I’ve just upgraded my Travel forum to vBulletin 3.6 and I have found a very neat new feature, where you can add an RSS feed within the forum admin panel, and when you post a blog article, the RSS feed picks this article up and displays it within any part of the forum.
So, today, I created a new user called News Bot, I gave them administer permissions, and added the RSS feed for my blog – vBulletin then creates a CRON job, which updates whatever you wish.
Now when I post in my blog, the News Bot creates a new post, with the blog title, a snippet of the blog entry and then a link to the actual article on my blog – pretty neat huh? Forum members can then discuss this article, which helps improve the forum, or they can click through and comment on the blog.
I then had a thought – forums require content – you require visitors and comments on your blog, so why don’t you contact a vBulletin forum owner within your niche, and ask them if they could add your RSS feed to their forum – when you blog, your posts are promoted on the forum, but the forum owner then has quality content for discussion – both of you win.
If you want to see this cool functionality in action just let me know.
My husband created a hack months ago that will do this with PHBB.
Cool – I’ve moved away from PhpBB simply because of security, and search engine optimisation. Forums are tough cookies to crack though – not easy to promote, thats why I thought that if a blogger and a forum owner got together, it would be really useful for both parties.
See, it’s things like this that keep me in love with vBulletin. Once I get my site going, I may have a forum. If I do, I don’t want to start with phpBB because it’s free and then switch to vBulletin later.
I’ll choose one and stick with it, but vBulletin costs a pretty penny.
Which should I go with?
I’d say vBulletin for security and its packed full of features
Well the Invision Graphics forum is optimised. If you are a coder, you have no problem with PHBB.LOL I’d say go with vBulletin if you have no experience Algorithm .
You don’t have to be a coder to use PhpBB or VB – if you did no one would use them. Go for which is the best for you to implement – bear in mind that for security, and SEO can be a problem for phpBB though.
I think, that is interesting for all.
Your site is perfect!