Posted: 10/20/2002 7:07:00 AM

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In-Portal certainly looks like a great package, and I like the idea of a central admin system to control things. I already use In-Link and have had no problems with it.

I do have a few concerns with moving my whole site over to in-portal.

There are already lots of great scripts out there (both free and commercial) that are very good at what they do. For intechnic to write their own versions of similar scripts is going to be a big (and long) task.

Will there be any scope within in-portal to integrate with these other scripts? I guess it's going to be easier for these other scripts to be "hacked" to use the in-portal user database (and other core data). It would be a good idea to allow links to other scripts' admin panels within the in-portal admin screen.

Example of such scripts:-

Forums - vBulletin is the obvious example. I know intechnic are developing in-bulletin, but to compete with the big established scripts is going to be some task.

Ads - Software like phpadsnew is widely used, and it is very good at its job. I know it doesn't use a user system, so integration is probably not going to be much of an issue, but methods to allow phpadsnew code to be used on the in-portal pages are a must.

Reviews - Censura is a great reviews script, which can integrate with loads of forum community scipts. I'm sure Censura's developers will be able to make it comaptible with the in-portal user database too.

Many people (including myself) are going to be reluctant to ditch scripts (especially commercial ones) in favour of new products just out of beta.

Any thoughts?

Darren.

Posted: 11/11/2002 10:39:00 AM

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You are addressing some very interesting points and your arguments are absolutely valid. However, if you look at posts on this forum about this same topic about a year ago, you'd see that we have had discussions about this for a while. Furthermore, we have attempted on numerous occasions to do exactly what you are saying - to establish relationships with other companies/groups in order to put together integration packages/modules for other third party products.

The answer is yes, you will be able to integrate In-portal with other third-party scripts. Those are the services that we offer on commercial basis or you can do it on your own. However, after much time and efforts spent we quickly realized that it is almost impossible to do that in the way that we wanted to get it done – to produce and official integration package. Unfortunately, very few companies were actually interested in combining efforts (and as you can imagine there is a lot of coordination needed in order to maintain and support such product integrations). For those few who were actually interested, there were still a lot of unanswered questions left: whose responsibility is it to support such integration package, what about new version, releases? In some cases there were even legal issues involved…

In another words, we made the most logical choice of creating and supporting multiple modules ourselves. While it is increasingly difficult to do, you as a customer will hopefully appreciate having to deal with only one company, one product registration, one support department... And with your support, it is our hope that eventually our In-portal modules will be as good if not better feature wise as the leading scripts in the industry.