Do you think vBulletin should continue with their gradual refactoring?

Or just say 'screw this' and rewrite everything at once? I've seen quite a few people on vBulletin.com suggest maybe they should just scrap the step by step refactoring and release a full rewrite like the original intention to fix the bugs.

 

I can't see it ever going that way - too many important people at Internet Brands are fans of the rapid succession of releases that a refactor rather than a rewrite can potentially deliver.

 

It's hard to say without timescales.

What's important to me is knowing how long it would take for the re-write and how long would it take to add a decent(/stable) CMS after that.

 

At least when IB took over we started to get some SN and other much-needed functionality - who really knows how out of date things would have got otherwise? IPB prob would have steamed ahead. Guess we won't know who really pushed for the new features - IB or the old devs? It just happened to coincide with happening after IB took over. I do feel that things started to get stale way before IB came on the scene tho - I remb researching Drupal way back then.

I'm not quite sure what I thought of the old devs tbh. Sometimes I thought (some of them at least) were cool, but other times I just felt an air of arrogance and got the impression they thought they were better than everyone else guess I could have miss-read things tho (although I've heard other people say similar).

Freddie always seemed to want to please - even tho I think he got frustrated at times (more so since IB has taken over if anything).

In some ways I'm glad - because it pushed me into going custom - out of all the off-the-peg solutions out there, none will give us everything we want...

 

This incremental rewrite is way too incremental. It makes vb4 hardly usable for large sites and will surely impact addon coders, as they will have to rewrite their addons again and again. This may only add to IB's problems with the addon community. Also see:
Refactoring the code 4 times: How is IB going to keep its coding community?

Those who want to develop upon vb4's CMS (like myself) will have to wait until the CMS really Gold and is complete with multiple continent types and real comments.
I suspect the real shocker will come when vb forum will be refactored to a CMS content type.

I posted this at vbulletin.com and directly asked Don to respond:
Don: Where are we now? Where are we heading?

Unfortunately no IB staff member responded to this important question.

 

On of the reasons why I am giving 4 a miss for now A1 - it's gonna take years for it to be a refined product.

 

And I suspect skins will be affected in addition to the addons.

To me, the business decision to release many versions that need many different addons & skins, is another example of how they plan on using vB in the foreseeable future.

1. Develop, test, release code.
2. The Internet Brands people upgrade some of their sites, then give feedback to vb team
3. The feedback from the customers over on vB.com may also be listened to, or not.
4. Go back to step #1.

With the ad revenue from the Internet Brands sites dwarfing the licensing revenue of vB, I'm not sure they care that the coders and skiners have to repeat work, or if people even use the interim vb4 releases.


But I could be wrong...

 

I hope that will happen before vb5.

 

From both a management and a development perspective, it wouldn't make any sense to do so.

From the Management perspective, read Kier's post. The release rate is extremely high, which is what they want.

From the Development perspective, it makes little sense to just scrap the work and rebuild. It would virtually render everything done up to now a waste of time.

And when you waste time, you piss off a lot of people.

 

Okay, so I'll try something interesting here... would it have been better if they'd rewrote the whole thing in the first place, before the refactoring began?

 

You seem much more knowledgeable about these things than I am, but I thought re-factoring was another name for re-writing code.

So if the code was re-written there would be no need for re-factoring.

 

Okay, refactoring is rewriting it in stages with some old code remaining until all is new, rewrite refers to rewriting all code in one go.

 

They should just rewrite everything in one shot. That way we can finally have a little bit of normalcy return and every update wouldn't break something else...

 

Yep.

 

^Can you explain why in some more detail?

 

Because combining old code with new code creates more issues than it fixes.

You have to write the new code, then update the old code with band aid fixes to accommodate for the parts that are already refactored, while still maintaining code support for the parts that haven't been refactored.

It just creates a developmental headache, and a lot of unnecessary work.

... looks like I'm right, too.

 

I think the incremental rewrite is at least too incremental. It makes little sense the way it is now and in my book the current stage of vb4 is beta at best.

 

I'm really getting rather tired of this... Yea I'm upset at the quality of product and should of been re-wrote from the get go. The part is I'm trying to learn the VB4 since now I'm stuck and no way out...

So now i'm going to hopefully learn from all you and maybe come out ahead...