vBulletin Forums List Page?

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:

image.png865×394 55.3 KB

And make the threads page look more like:

image.png1077×422 78.5 KB

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.

image.png719×434 35.1 KB

Any tips from people that have done lots of Discourse development?

I think the easiest way is to make a plugin.

Next, override the template files starting from:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/app/assets/javascripts/discourse/templates/components/categories-and-latest-topics.hbs

(in our case )

We tried to find which files are responsible for shaping the appearance (sketch):

We got this.:

cat1142×510 46.5 KB

In other words, I think using this approach, you can radically change the design.

Disadvantage: you’ll need to follow the change of the official files in order to make timely changes. Maybe there’s a better way.

Hmm no I think @sam would recommend a different method here.

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.

I strongly recommend against using a plugin here, a theme should do the trick and is far simpler to manage long term, same techniques work with themes