User ryanerwin is migrating a large vBulletin community to Discourse and wants to make the main page and threads page look more like vBulletin to ease the transition for their users. They have tried using the “admin” options and writing CSS, but are looking for further advice.
Stranik suggests making a plugin and overriding template files, such as categories-and-latest-topics.hbs, to achieve this. They provide an example of how they have successfully used this approach to create a vBulletin-like design.
However, codinghorror thinks there may be a better method and suggests waiting to hear from sam. ryanerwin appreciates Stranik’s idea, but also looks forward to hearing from sam.
Sam ultimately recommends against using a plugin and instead suggests using a theme, which is simpler to manage long-term and can achieve the same result.
I’m trying to migrate an old, large vBulletin community to discourse. Personally, I can’t stand vBulletin…
However, some of our VIPs absolutely love vBulletin because they’ve been using it everyday for 10+ years… Previewing the new discourse version of the forum, they’ve been a bit startled by how big the transition, and asked for ways to make it look more like vBulletin.
I’ve gone through the “admin” options, and written a lot of CSS for the new site, but in some cases the data is quite different.
Specifically, I would like to make the main page look more like:
Joking about how bad vBulletin is or how people should just adapt aside, thoughts about how to do this.
For example, I thought using the Categories page as the default page would be helpful, but checking the plugin-outlet locations for the categories page, I don’t see a good place to pull in the last post for each category.
Thanks for the idea @Stranik
Looks really great as far as getting close for users completely adapted to vBulletin!
It’s like a vBulletin view actually looks nice!
Per Jeff, Look forward to hearing from @sam about the recommended way to do this.
