Now this was interesting. A well written article on why one site is switching over to use Drupal's built in forum rather then continue to use vbulletin.

I understand that vbulletin is a popular forum purchased for use on a variety of sites. People using it and another popular open source forum software phpBB often use the 'Drupal forums aren't standard' argument to justify their position.

Neither are standard. They are like Windows. Widely used so people are accustomed to the same look and feel out the box. Not a bad thing, just not a 'Standard'. They are also dedicated to one thing, a feature rich forum rather then a feature rich, flexible CMS.

To achieve a similar setup out of the box with Drupal you have to do a bit more work, add contrib modules, theme appropriately and perhaps a bit of code. Not always the easiest thing depending on what you are trying to achieve. For those who take the effort, I think, the reward of a forum directly integrated into the sites content will out weigh the initial difficulties. You end up with a site that is and looks like yours, not yavbs/yaphpbbs (yet another vbulletin/phpBB site). It has integrated search built right in along with all the other Durpal features.

For those interested in continuing the improvements that have occurred for Drupal 6 for Drupal 7, please help out like minded others on the groups site.

Part 1 on the article can be found here. I am looking forward to Part 2.

note: You can tell they are using Drupal because they forgot to change out the Druplicon favicon. :)