Forum Options with upgrade path to vBulletin

[scott.blanchard]

I'm considering adding a forum to my member's area and have a couple of questions...

1) Can it be set up so that there is a free area in which everyone who has access to DAP has access to the free area but does not have access to the "paid" area?

2) Is it possible to integrate the forum with DAP so that when a user purchases a "forum membership" in DAP, it unlocks the "paid" area of the forum to them?

3) Are there cheaper or free forum software products that (a) work with DAP and (b) are upgradable to vBulletin (perhaps via a migration script)?

[DevinBest]

Just a note to add my support for the idea of a pre-vBulletin solution. I'd like to start out this way as well.

[Veena]

>> 1) Can it be set up so that there is a free area in which everyone who has access to DAP has access to the free area but does not have access to the "paid" area? <<

Yes. You can create usergroups in vB to restrict access to forums and configure forum rules in dap to only allow paid users access to the paid usergroups.

>> 2) Is it possible to integrate the forum with DAP so that when a user purchases a "forum membership" in DAP, it unlocks the "paid" area of the forum to them? <<

Yes. You can set up the forum mapping rules (at product level) to allow access to the right usergroup(s) / forum(s) when a user is added to product.

>> 3) Are there cheaper or free forum software products that (a) work with DAP and (b) are upgradable to vBulletin (perhaps via a migration script)?<<

You can use any of the WP based forum plugins that are supported by DAP.
See - http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/doc/forum-integration/

With these free forums you cannot control access at product / membership level. You can configure dap to allow forum access to only paid members OR all members (preventing non-members from posting). No migration path offered currently from these free forums to vB.

[MattJones]

Hi Scott
I have been looking at the same thing and did a bit of research with one of the guys from vBulletin. They have a 3 tier system where any forum in tier one they will support, any forum in tier two there are no guarantees, only a maybe and tier three forums they wont support. To see which forums are allocated in which tier go to http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/ which is the online manual.
Click on appendix 5:impex import system
then impex systems
then tier systems list.

The long and the short of it is bbpress is regarded as tier 2 which is the only one out of the 3 wordpress forums that DAP recommends, the other 2 are rated as tier 3 or not at all.
So for me i will install bbpress and hope for the best when its time to move across to vBulletin.

Hope this helps

CHeers,
Matt

[pbeckley]

I know this in an older post, but I thought I'd chime in with my solution, although it's not 100% automated. Disclosure: I haven't tried this with DAP, I used to have a membership script that tied directly into the WP user table so when the script created a member, they were also immediately a member of the Wordpress application itself, which is not how DAP is out of the box, nor does it need to be. I created forums/user groups and permissions groups for each product, and also a public forum that everyone had access to. When a user purchased access to a product, they automatically had access to the public forum but I had to manually add them to the correct user group. It worked, but I had to tell my new customers that there was a 24hr turn around on that part of their membership. Not the best solution, but it's free and I imagine with WP syncing enabled in DAP it would work pretty much the same.