Since I bought a site from Peter and make a point to read his posts on other forums I expect I will have a good time here.

I am currently trying to get my mind around the fundamental differences between a wordpress Gallery2 combo vs vBulletin with PhotoPost (besides about $400

mhdoc

Welcome to the Small Business Forum.

Wordpress, Gallery2, vBulletin, Photopost; I'd say it really depends on what kind of site you want to build. Horses for different courses, you know.

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Peter T Davis
Frixer, Inc.
Helping people make profitible businesses on the web.

The trick of course is that at the beginning your don't know much about horses.

In the computer world, another issue is you are always dealing with moving targets. I revisited the Gallery site after a three month absence and there are enough new mods to alter the equation.

mhdoc

What are you hoping to accomlish with the site? If I knew more I might be able to make a decent recommendation.

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Peter T Davis
Frixer, Inc.
Helping people make profitible businesses on the web.

Sorry, wasn't trying to be confusing. However, maybe others would benefit from what I found so far.

My comments were based on the composite needs of an old site, a new site and an idea.

1. A friend suggested I add a classified section to my old established home repair site.

2. My son suggested that wordpress wasn't going to cut it for the variety of subjects we hope to cover on a new site and maybe forum software would. To me that means vBulletin.

3. I have nurtured the idea of selling photos for some time, but put it off because of the amount of coding required.

Searching for classifieds software lead me to PhotoPost Classifieds which it turns out is a stand alone application but able to bind tightly with vBulletin. The also have PhotoPostPro which I think is what Shawn at DigitalPoint uses. Somewhere in their support forums I ran across a reference to PhotoStore by ktool.net.

I came very close to spending $299 right on the spot; their description of the PhotoStore software sounded like a perfect match for my dreams about selling photos. I made myself back off and calm down a little and realized they have no support forum, all the Google rankings for sites recommending the product seemed to be affiliates, the "no refunds" policy in the licensing agreement seemed harsh, and the license is restricted to one domain.

Somewhere in one of the support forums I found a reference to vBadvanced; a photo gallery extension to vBulletin. It has recently be purchased by PhotoPost . So now I am back at the PhotoPost site trying to figure out the difference between PhotoPost Pro and vBadvanced. The answer seems to be that vbadvanced ONLY works as a vBulletin extension while PhotoPostPro CAN work as a vBulletin extension, but will also function as a standalone application.

Keep in mind that at this point I am looking at $99 for the classifieds, $160 for vBulletin, $129 for PhotoPost Pro, and $299 for PhotoStore. (Are we confused yet

I decided to revisit Gallery2 which is a new version of photo gallery software I had used before(Free under GPL). There have been lots of mods and extensions since I last looked and in their support forum I fell across a company called digibug.com who had just published the API to use their services. In brief, it looks like digibug wants to act like a dropshipper for photos, prints and other products I could sell off my site(s). So maybe I don't need the PhotoStore product; Gallery2 with the digibug API gets me something even better.

At this point I have put the classifieds on hold as taking to much effort to start and manage. I have loaded Gallery2 (20 meg upload) and need to find a theme I like and load pictures. I need to install the Digibug Gallery2 module and set up the landing page(s) at Digibug. The forum idea for the new site is also on hold.

Why write all this on a small business forum? I am easily sucked into doing to much technical work myself. I find it very hard to pay someone to do something I know I can do myself. Especially when what I want to do is only half thought out and would be hard to explain to someone. BUT, I recently put up a shopping cart system for a customer. I bought the cart software, set the configuration for their operation, and turned them loose. Its been a month and I haven't gotten any calls for support. It made me think buying whatever you can and getting it busy selling for you is a much quicker path to cash than what I had been doing.

Now back to that Gallery2 install...

mhdoc