vB4 Beta 3 is OUT!

They just released the beta to people with active licenses who haven't purchased 4 yet. Sweet. I'm installing it on a board I just installed the other day to play with it.

 

Following on from what I wrote in this thread, and after reading numerous comments in this thread, I can quite honestly say that my confidence in VB4 is shattered! :idiot: LOL!

I wrote:

+ can anybody link me to their site, if they've gone live with VB4 so I can check it out? <3

 

Wayne upgraded his site to vB4. http://vbcodex.com/forums.php

 

Thanks Peggy!

I'm very disappointed with the original and basic styling. Its just very plain and dull - completely putting me off upgrading!

 

Irony, or not?

 

Of all the modified styles I have seen so far, all of them involve little more than changing the category bar colour and some of the navbar.

Everyone is leaving icons, buttons and backgrounds in the default blue/grey colours, which frankly makes these styles look amateurish.

I will be wanting simple coloured variations of the default, as I have now, but I will want to customise ALL elements, not just the easy ones. I sincerely hope this isn't going to be too difficult. I'm not optimistic, seeing as how nobody else seems to be managing it yet.

 

Keep in mind that it's still rather early. I'm not sure that people are getting to involved yet given that we're just a few days into the beta stage. At the same time, with those icons, it's probably much more of a from-the-ground-up design.

 

I'll be making designs, but not until they go final with 4.0. No reason to do it now and waste my time upgrading it each release until then.

 

I like your work Andy, look forward to seeing what you produce for 4.0

 

Thanks, same goes for you as well. You working solely on IPB this round, or going to be doing both?

 

I'm waiting to finish my latest project for my vB forums before moving to customizing vBulletin 4.

 

I customized my entire board, colors, CMS, Blog - everything and then I found out that with future releases of the BETA and Release Candidates the stylevar and templates will be changing meaning that my style will break so I have stopped until things have been finalised a little more (at least the templates stuff).

Does anyone have any idea when vBulletin 4.0 Beta 4 will be released? Would be fantastic to see some of the bugs fixed however not to bad for the first attempt of the CMS etc.

 

No idea. They haven't said anything to the alpha/beta testers group.

 

The betas will generally just appear when they are deemed ready. Sometimes you'll get a vague idea a day or two in advance, but not always.

This is just the nature of software development, there really is no way of pinning any sort of date down.

 

vBulletin 4 looks great, but I won't be upgrading until all hacks are developed because I feel as if a forum could really lose it's appeal if all the hacks disappeared for a while.

 

I have retreated a bit this week into my safe and comfy 3.8 world, where I know everything that goes on and can make it do what I want.

I feel all powerful these days with 3.8, I can make almost anything happen (well it feels that way anyway).

With my 4.0 test site I can't even work out how to change the width of the left postbit block! It might as well be written in Chinese for all the sense it all makes to me. And in actual fact it's started to scare me a bit and so I have retreated away from it and probably won't touch it again now until after Gold comes out.

This is not a criticism of the product, it's probably more a criticism of my own skills (or lack of them). With 3.8 I have self-taught myself everything, but I've probably made the mistake of learning what does what without trying to understand WHY.

I seem wholly unable to transfer those skills to 4.0 and feel like I've got writers' block or something. I just can't even get started!

Hopefully there's a cure for this illness.

In the meantime I'm immersing myself in wholesome 3.8 goodness before I drive myself potty.

I feel like an absolute n00b and we all know what people do to newbies:

 

Same here, Mark.

Only my problem is, I haven't put in the full effort to learn the vBulletin 4 system. I don't have the time right now, really.

Which is a shame because I would love to start porting my customizations.

 

Sadly, this is exactly how the average admin will feel, newbie or not, when they get ahold of vB4.

It has me beyond confused, and totally frustrated, but that is mostly in the styling components. And I've had many weeks to try and wrap my head around it. It just does not make sense to me.

 

I was able to get my link consensus mod working. But i'm waiting to see if they make it standard in vB4 yet or not like they're supposed to.

 

This is the sad truth when dealing with a major version update. It happened in vB1 > vB2, and again in vB2 > vB3.

It also happened when I moved from Burning Board 1.1.1 to Burning Board Lite 1.2 back in '04/'05, it had a certain learning curve I had to master.

MyBB 1.2 > 1.4, same general thing due to the massive admin cp upgrade.

One could say, it's almost like switching software.

What you're experiencing is natural when it comes to new major versions. If you work at it, you'll get it, no doubt about that.