vbulletin 4.0: CMS but new URLs

Good news and bad news about vbulletin 4.0:

Good news! They finally built an official CMS around it!
Bad news! They’ve rewritten URLs!

The first is a very positive development - I’ve been using vbulletin for forums, but usually had to use Wordpress as a front end CMS. It would be great to be able to integrate both.

However, a change from Wordpress to vbulletin would require URL structure from WP being retained, which would be a technical challenge.

But what is really disturbing is how they are rewriting the actual URLs for even the forums - trying to change how the board and thread ID variables are written, and also added the name of the board or thread in the URL string.

If it is released as that it will be unusable for anyone who takes their internet presence seriously - that would mean a complete rewriting of all URLs for a website, which means a potentially painful process of Google having to reindex the entire site with the new URLs while disregarding the old URLs.

It’s something I have done before, with young boards, moving from YaBB SE (remember that?!) to vbulletin - but there is no way a complete change in URL structure should be undertaken lightly.

The surprise is that vbulletin have seen fit to do such a thing - but I guess this is a typical example of web developers and designers pushing with a method because it suits them, without serious consideration as to whether users actually want it, or the actual negative impact of doing so.

In the meantime, it remains a situation to watch, but at present, there’s no way I could “upgrade” to vb4 - because the negative impact of URL rewriting (and let’s face it, sloppily done at that) offers absolutely no benefits, and plenty of risks.

In the meantime, also note the lack of use of nofollow on member links, which will make vb4 forums a particular target for member spamming (they already are, I have all member profiles viewable by members only, but not guests to help address it, but using dofollow instead of nofollow … ?? … definitely an invitation to trouble!).

You can view the new vbulletin 4 here: http://www.vbulletin.com/