After 10+ years of using vBulletin I never thought I'd say this. I still remember the good old 2.x days when to put in a mod you had to follow instructions to change the code. For each upgrade you had to re-hack those files. People were really excited for 3.x! Internet Brands has left a sour taste in a lot of its customers mouths. Not only because they keep putting out things that customers aren't even asking for, but because it's done in such a haphazard way, it makes makes people dizzy. The CMS in vb4 is an absolute dog, and vb4 is still slow. They can't even get the editor to work correctly in IE10. Their solution? Disable the editor. They release a Facebook app product then abandoned it. The 'Mobile Suite' was/is a disaster. You can't upgrade from a 3.x license to a 4.x license without paying $200. They attempted to sue Xenforo for creating a competing product, which really made a lot of people mad and is just bad PR. But their biggest mistake as of late is they released vB5 before it was even close to being done. It's slowly getting usable, but it's still missing a lot. There are lots of things that were seemingly changed/added for no apparent reason, which makes things confusing. For example, the latest activity stream in a post, or the comment on individual posts. Huh? I just bought my first Xenforo license. I haven't gotten too far into it yet, but already I can see how much more sense things make. It loads faster, looks better, and has features that you and your members will actually use. If I had the ability to easily update my other sites, I would do so, and that's saying a lot.
Correction - you can't update a 3.x license to get the latest 3.8 release without paying $190. This one really bothers me. Mind you, in the case of this site I do not want to update it to vbulletin 4.x or 5, I simply want to apply the latest security and bug fixes for the 3.x series. Why would I pay $190 to update the software if I can get something like Xenforo for $140? Nothing they are doing here makes any sense.
A full time programmer to update custom mods and the $$ to do so. Unfortunately I'm not a very good programmer.
See http://cellphoneforums.net/phone-database That is the bulk of it. I understand some of that could be done with the resource manager, but there would still be a lot of customization that would have to happen to make it a fully functional 'product' system that does all the interlinking between members and threads.
I forgot to mention that you'll also need his Custom Fields add-on too. Library basically gives you a simple article system, you create Library nodes basically the same as you would have forums, for example in your case one for Android and another for Windows Phone. When someone creates an article, it's nearly the same as creating a thread but then a separate thread for discussions is created in a forum of your choice. The article can have multiple pages and the display page will be tabbed, it will have the content displayed, with next and previous page links if needed, and then another tab for the discussion which will then load the thread. Custom Fields does what it says, you can then add more fields for different information like battery life etc. When creating the Library nodes, you can enter the information you want displayed to contain all this data in a nice format. I do believe custom fields works on standard forum threads too.
I bought my VB license in Jan, thinking that DP uses it. And then you switched to XF in Feb. Now after few months of trying with VB, I've realised that I would have to shift to XF as well !
We were live on XF in January actually. I guess that's what happens when you do stuff just because someone else is and you don't do your own research.