vbulletin addons coming.
Jelsoft has days back announced its foray into the addon market for vbulletin. Considering thats its main rival, Invision, had for long been involved in addon products for its own flagship community board system, Invision Power Board, it was probably no surprise that jelsoft would come up with similar solutions.
Lets take a look at what has been announced by jelsoft till now
Blog and Social Networking
There was a huge demand for a blogging system for vbulletin. Ofcourse recently a mod to take care of the demand had been developed in the form of vBlogetin. However with jelsoft coming up with its own solution and promising a much more tighter integration, one wonders what the future holds for vBlogetin. At the moment these are the promised features of the new blogging system
- A full featured blog solution for forum members with vbulletin permission inheritance.
- Private blogging and inline blog moderation
- Trackbacks and Linkbacks support with a promise of improved SEO
- Social networking functionality with the ability to build relationships and communities.
- Spruced up profile pages of members.
- Template driven and extendable by 3rd parties via plugins
It looks like a great offering and couple this with the vbulletin support(which is top class) this looks like a great solution for almost all forum webmasters. However we still do not know the pricing and once thats annouced, i will blog about this again ;)
Project Tools
This is basically a bug tracker, feature request tracker and a project management tool combined into one. Its basically intended for support websites or development sites who are into the field of product development and testing. Nothing much has been revealed so we will see how it goes when they release more details.
Overall the entry of jelsoft will surely hot up the addon market for vbulletin. If nothing else it will compel the third party developers to improve their product line and support. Case in point is Photopost whose support and development for products like vbgallery has been patchy at best. Hopefully with a Gallery addon coming from vbulletin soon, Photopost will get its act together!!
