vBulletin Installation

Now that I have ionCube set up and running, I finally am ready to move forward with a lot of things. I use vbSEO - which is a utility that provides some useful features to vBulletin - and the use of that script requires a bytecode php interpreter. I've long been using a combination of eAccellerator and Zend Optimizer, but with my having upgraded to php 5.2 I was out of luck. Since the upgrade I've been busy with a lot of other things, including dealing with several server outages - both my own and some of my clients.

Anyhow, now that everything is up and running smoothly, I've gone ahead and run through the vBulletin install for this site and I'm hoping to get a vB / MT integration going in the very near future. I'm also working on a redesign for this site that hopefully will port well to some of my other sites and make for a decent structure from which I can manage things more effectively.

I'm actually very excited about the redesign because I've been looking at a lot of different sites for inspiration for a decent home page design that would be flexible enough for me to utilize throughout several projects and I keep coming up short. I think that I've found one and in large part it was inspired by CNN.com.

I've also been thinking about building some external management utilities and I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't be worth it to simply extend the functionality of Movable Type. We'll see what happens - I'm not sure what direction I'll be moving towards just yet.

All of my work for the last six months should really start paying off. I think realistically by the end of January I'll be moving into full swing with a manageable work schedule rather than all of these late night programming sessions. Certainly my work load is going to change significantly from prototyping and development to include management and promotional activities. I'm really excited to finally be seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.

The vBulletin installation should be public within a few days once I get all the basic configuration parameters solidified. I'm also hoping to get some sort of authentication integration working between MediaWiki and vB so that I only have one interface from which to manage users and only one registration requirement for people to participate in the community.