Why PHP and not ASPX ?

[Mehyar]

Well I cant remember when i first came to this site, maybe it was in may or june. And from that day on I fell in love with it. It is really beautiful to find a community for .NET as beautiful as this one. But still one thing I cant figure out. Why was this forum developed in PHP ???????

I mean why not ASPX, I feel thats a shame to do a forum talking about ASPX and .NET and not use these technologies that we are so fond of and working with to develop it.

I guess the developers of this forum had their reasons but I am really curios....

 

[wyrd]

The people who own this site didnt build these forums (although they did make modifications). If you notice at the bottom of the page, these are vBulletin forums, which IMO are the best forums you could possibly own for a heavily trafficed site.

vBulletin has been developed and updated for years. Simply put, there arent any ASP.NET forums around that provide the features, security, stability, and speed that vBulletin does. Sure the owners of this site could make their own, but why? Itd be quite an undertaking to make a feature-rich set of forums that worked well under a huge amount of traffic.

 

[Derek Stone]

It is quite an undertaking, and its about half done. Security, stability and speed have all been matched and exceeded due to the architecture of the project, and the feature set will improve as time passes. VBulletin is a great product for systems limited to PHP, but it simply cant match the speed and scalability of ASP.NET. The conversion is being made due to too much stress on the current database server, and this project has already proven, in my tests, to be fair more efficient than the current implementation.

If anyone is seriously interested in helping out with this project please contact me directly. We still have quite a bit of work left to be done.

 

[Mehyar]

Great to here that Derek...

Way to go..

 

[Derek Stone]

Well, I hope to have something for the two communities by the beginning of the new year, at the latest. Hopefully at that point all issues, both personal and technical in nature, will be resolved and we can usher in a new era for these forums, as happened before a few years back. Granted I cant speak for Bob or these two communities at an official level, so well just have to wait and see what transpires.

 

[wyrd]

Youre actually porting vBulletin to ASP.NET, or just using it as a reference for ideas?

Edit:
On a side note, I may be interested in helping when I can (being swamped with homework sucks). Unfortunately, Im not quite sure how much help Id be.

 

[Mehyar]

Ya me too wyrd, I even dont have an internet access at home now , i can only work from the office but i got a lot to do...

 

[Derek Stone]

I started developing the software in quarter one of this year and its progressed slowly but surely since then with the help of Garrett and Simon. The software is not a conversion of vBulletin by any stretch of the means. The only similar attribute is the interface, and even that is bound to change. Of course many of the features will be the same, as is the case with all bulletin board systems. The effort is to provide these (and other) communities with software that feels somewhat like vBulletin, to ease the transition between the two, yet offer a faster, more secure and more scalable solution that runs on the .NET platform (this includes Mono, although that is not the focus).

The most current release (WCP20030921170000) is now running at the following location: http://www.elitevb.com/forums/. Keep in mind the software is still in its pre-alpha stage, so dont expect too much feature-wise as of yet. Comments, suggestions and tactfully phrased insults are always welcome.

If you are interested in tracking the projects development or interested in helping out you can join the project workspace; a link is provided at the address above.

 

[wyrd]

Nice. Looks like its come a long ways already.

 

[jesus4u]

Why not use the asp.net forums? They are free.

http://www.asp.net/Forums/Download/Default.aspx?tabindex=0&tabid=1

 

[Divil]

Those forums are not nearly as feature-rich as we need.

 

[wyrd]

Curious.. why do you need feature-rich forums? Sure there are a few good features that you cant do without (view new posts for example), but those can be easily hacked into an already made forums if they dont include such features.

Now, if the forums were horribly programmed, are slower then a snail on a good day, and suck up more ram then a baby on a hot mommas breast, then thats a different story all together.