Ben Ruset Sysadmin, etc.

Frustrated

As you may know, I run a fairly large website over at njpinebarrens.com. It's made up of three components - vBulletin discussion forums, Drupal CMS, and PhotoPost Pro image gallery. The forums are the part of the site that get the most amount of traffic. The Drupal side holds all of the articles that myself and other contributors have written. The Photopost site is a free image hosting area for folks to upload their pictures of the Pine Barrens.

One of the nice aspects of the site is that it integrates Drupal and vBulletin together. I use a fork of Drupal called vBDrupal which more or less is a hacked up version of Drupal that replaces all of Drupal's user database with vBulletin's, as well as replacing Drupal's article commenting system with vB. So, when a user signs up in vB they automatically get an account made for them in Drupal. This is not a huge deal for the every day user, but for those who contribute articles it makes life easier for me as I can just add their user account as the author. Then, when someone reads an article written by a contributing author they can click on a link and go to that person's profile and contact them if they want.

The other great thing is the article commenting system. If I post an article in Drupal the system will automatically create a thread in vBulletin, and any comments get posted to that thread. Then, when you go visit the article in Drupal you see all of the comments presented on the same page of the article. It's really very nice.

The big problem is that vBDrupal is a fork of Drupal and as such development severely lags behind the mainline Drupal distribution. Drupal 6 has been out for a few months and vBDrupal still is in version 5. The occasional security patch for vBDrupal gets rolled out, but it appears that development on the software has stagnated. If you ask for a timeframe on vBDrupal 6 you get a "when we're ready" response which I can appreciate, but it doesn't help me decide what direction I want to take with my site. 

I have been playing with Drupal 6 in a sandbox and it's really, really nice. I would love to migrate over to Drupal 6, but I'd be losing a bunch of functionality. There is a bridge for Drupal 6 and vB, but it in effect does the opposite of what vBDrupal does. It will take users from vB and create them in Drupal's database. This would be alright except that the vB database only has the hash for the password, so I can't bulk import users. It will only import a user if they log in through Drupal, which I don't even want to expose to my users. I can have authentication happen via cookie, but I won't come close to importing my entire userbase over, which I need to do before I roll Drupal 6 live. My only option for rolling out a Drupal 6 site would be to manually create users for each person who has ever written an article and ditch the commenting system entirely.

Another option would be to switch from Drupal to Subdreamer, which is not open source but promises a very rich integration with vB. A license costs $99 so it's not quite a trivial investment. At the moment their online demo seems to be down (and judging from their forum, seems to have been down for a while). I've also heard grumblings about how nobody writes any free plugins for it, so it could end up costing me a ton of money down the road.

So now I'm at an impasse. There's a lot I want to do with the CMS side of the site, but I feel like I need to get some sort of direction. I can make the decision to stay with vBDrupal and eventually fall too far out of date with Drupal. I can go to a non-forked version of Drupal and lose several nice features but go back to a mainline distribution and not have to worry about being caught without security fixes or cool new features. Finally, I could go closed source and possibly be nickeled and dimed to death for everything I want to implement. 

At this point in time I think I just need to stop thinking about it for a few days.