Adrian Schneider – Dev

Clients have been asking me since its early beta stages what my thoughts are about vBulletin 4. Usually I joke and spew out the usual garbage about how horrible it is. I’m not saying it isn’t, but I think it’s time I give it a fair review.

Background

Before I go into much detail, let me begin by explaining my experience and background with vBulletin. My first use with vBulletin was back in 2004 on a gaming site. Since 2005, I have been developing on it as an application platform, and for a while, was doing it full time (2 years or so). I am confident that I am one of the most experience vBulletin modders around. I love vBulletin, though over the years I became annoyed with working with it due to the outdated codebase. In the past two years or so, I have shifted most of my custom develoment to Zend Framework, which is of course at a much higher standard.

With the illusion of vBulletin 4 in my mind, I was very excited to begin looking at it. Read more…

It seems people underestimate the value of security. Most sites that I check on are running old versions of popular web applications (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin, phpBB, etc.) and it’s downright scary. These applications, due to their extreme popularity, are huge targets for hackers. Many succeed, too. They have such large codebases that sometimes the developers slip up and leave security holes open.

These companies have been pretty good with promptly releasing patches, so it becomes a race between the hackers and the millions of sites out there to get patched. Most don’t though, sadly.

I was working with a high profile site this weekend which was targeted, and here is an outline of some of that steps that we took to fight back… Read more…