UBB.Developers Forums General Discussion Chit Chat OpenTopic question

OpenTopic™ Personal cost $225 and Scalability = Unlimited vs UBB cost $199 and Scalability = Limited . What is the main differents compares to UBB besides this?

Plenty of differences. For starters Open Topic is a hosted board which IP maintains. You don't need to upgrade it, but they do have different customization options. You won't be able to hack it, like you can with your UBB either. It does offer different features, and uses a database backend, instead of text files.

UBB as I'm sure you know, is customizable, and there are a number of excellent hacks which can add new features to your board. However, if you hack your board, you limit the amount of support you will receive from others, and upgrades are your own responsibility, as well as providing a server to run it on.

I wouldn't compare the products based on price alone. Consider what you want to do with your board, and how you want to run and maintain it...then make your decision.

-Tacks

I have seen someone developing xml-based template hacks for OT.. I don't think he ever finished one tho.

OpenTopic *IS* hackable, just in a different way.

Rather than provding you with source code, you're provided with the raw data (in XML format) and a powerful tool to transform the data into something else (XSLT).

XSLT is powerful stuff... you can do MUCH more with that than with the UBB's template system. (i.e. grab data from dozens of other websites and use it on your forum pages, etc...)

The UBB and OT are otherwise completely beyond compare... they're totally different platforms based around two totally different ideals (not to mention the underlying technology - Java + Oracle vs Perl + Flat files)

I wish that I had understood that way back when... would have saved me LOTS of grief. *L*

yeah XSL is a very nifty way to customize the appearance of your Bulletin Board.

Its like CSS for HTML. But a lot advanced form of CSS .

Theres one other thing about UBB vs OpenTopic. If you get lots of users, and are worried about band-width cost, I suggest you should go for OpenTopic, since it will provide the speed and the costwise solution. I mean you can't have UBB with a million members getting several lackhs post per day, and serving millions of page views. But with OpenTopic anything's possible.

OT does scale tremendously... but you pay for that scalability, whether in pageviews or bandwidth... there are sites who need that type of solution, but for 98% of the sites out there, UBB can handle them...