To answer the questions about which I preferred though I think there has to be some understanding of what it was I was looking for and trying to do.  At the time I don’t think I really knew.  My friends and I played a good number of role playing games, computer games and board games, we discussed in-depth the aspects of various games we like and disliked.  We spent time writing rules and creating additional content for the ones we loved to play – all in the name of our love of the game.  My thought was to take some of this energy and try to build a community around it with Daggersden.  A blog to publish the content and a forum to discuss it.  I have always been a fan of Wordpress so the blogging engine was an easy choice.  For a forum I really didn’t know where to start though.  None of the open source or free forum engines integrated well with Wordpress.  I tried several of them early on as the site was being stood up – SMF, Drupal, phpBB – they all had arcane bridges that were barely supported and barely worked.  Things might be different now but this research and testing happened in 2004.

A friend of mine recommended vBulletin.  A great forum tool but with a hefty price tag as well.  It was an easy sell though as I had spent many hours, days likely, trying to force a fit using one of the other forums and vBulletin had a plug-in that did exactly what I was looking for, or so I thought at the time.  Granted the plug-in has grown a lot since 2004 and I have even offered source hacks to make it better on a few occasions, in particular around the nesting of parent to child forum relationships and the way they are displayed in the Wordpress admin console – I needed it to be possible to have five top level forums called “General Discussion” each under a different non-forum category, and be able to differentiate between them when creating a blog post that I wanted in the forums under General Discussion.

This setup, Wordpress and vBullein, worked for a while.  Lots of blog posts were made but as time went on there were little bugs that I just couldn’t get resolved with the integration.  User management wasn’t complex but it was problematic.  The tables were not one in the same and the bridge didn’t always work as expected, in particular for users that were admins or moderators in either product.  Editing and double posting became another problem.  This did get better but early on if you created a blog post and linked it back to the forum for discussion the post was one way.  If you used WP to edit your post the update did not get sent to VB as well and the author had to work with the admin, or a moderator on the VB side to get the content updated.  These problems were certainly not severe and had easy work around albeit manual ones.  The main problem I had with the bridge and still do today is that it disables the Wordpress comment engine.  Once you start using the bridge all comments are sent to the VB forum and any discussion requires the user to interact with the forum and not the blog.  This was sort of the point but the transition was not smooth and it was obvious you were leaving one and entering the other without any easy way to get back.

After a while I got tired of basically managing two systems and decided to scrap Wordpress and work with the forum only, adding the vBulleting Blog add-on for any user that wanted a blog as well.  Not my original design but by this point the site really had not attracted many active users outside of the friends that used it already anyway.  I decided I wanted to extend the forum a bit so I wrapped it with vbAdvanced to give it some of the spice I had with the forum but in a more native way to vBulletin.  It stayed like this until recently when I was notified my license was going to expire soon.  Since the monetizing idea never really took off and I really couldn’t justify continuing to pay for a site that wasn’t paying for itself I started to think about where I wanted daggersden to go next.

Again being a big fan of Wordpress and wanting to get back to blogging vs. forum content for the main aspect of the site I started looking around again for a forum that was fully integrated into Wordpress, either as a plug-in or via a well developed and maintained bridge.  The forum had to be free and preferably OSS so I could extend or enhance it as I saw fit.  Turns out the forum market for WP has grown considerably since 2004.  A quick Google search shows many results in various states of integration.  I found Simple:Press Forum quickly and read a number of very positive reviews.  The main fact that it was a full featured forum that was also a WP plug-in was a great combination.  A quick download and installation had the forum up and running quickly.  Sadly, but understandably, there are not migration tools to get my vBulletin forum data into Simple:Press.  I tried in vain to create a migration script but found the schema mapping between the insanely complex vBulletin database and that of Simple:Forum to be to complex for my skills – that or I was just being lazy.

I have to admit that I wish I would have found a plug-in even half as good as Simple:Press in 2004.  I wouldn’t be writing this post today most likely.  I always wanted the blog to be the entry point to daggersden and the forum to be a natural, two-way extension of it.  This plug-in takes it one step farther and offers the ability to create a blog post out of a forum entry should you want to.  All in all I am very pleased with the transition away from vBulletin and am happy to have found a forum plug-in that satisfies my requirements – however lose they may be.