Who's looking forward to vB4?

This is what I'm looking forward to. I haven't moved forward with some ideas thinking it will be easier to do it once in vB 4.

However, with no clear date for alpha release I may not wait forever. My timing is delayed further cuz I am one of those who will upgrade only after a couple of PL's come out. Bravely allowing the early adopters to be the test group.


I looked at the examples in Kier Darby's log on the official forum and thought they were very cool. As if someone decided that if we started over today, this is what we would produce. I hereby predict that the biggest hurdle to vB 4 will be that it is major change, lord help us. We know how well people handle that.

Aha. Hadn't thought of that. Some great ideas ...


So I surfed a little find out what all the hysteria was about regarding leaked information ... sounds like a classic corporate misstep that means little of substance, but resonates forever in the gossip feeding frenzy. Some people live for that stuff. Personally I am not wasting even a micro-second thinking about what that "information" might mean for the future. Sausage being made and all that. Will wait for Truth. And then panic.

Professional crisis managers would say that vB should have immediately announced from their own website that a leak occurred, providing details as to how it occurred, and accurate information about the rumors leaked (even if it is only that the piecemeal information is misleading, decisions have not been made and so on.) What people make up to fill in the gaps is almost always worse than the truth. Obviously some are taking it seriously and keeping the rumors going.

 

You can see some about the site/forum integration here: First Look: The vBulletin 4.0 Style - vBulletin Community Forum.

 

Not to be a negative nancy but I feel like a lot of focus is going into things that will probably not only cost extra, but will be useless to me.

Speaking mainly about the CMS. I mean I think a lot of vB customers bought vB for forum software, not for the whole site.

The forum I run has a little over half a million posts. The site is the forums - thus a CMS is useless since I have no content on the site other than the forum. Now, I realize that the majority of vB clients use vB in addition to their main site. The forum compliments the site; it is not the site itself.

However, even if I did run a "real" website...I'm not sure if I would be looking forward to this anyways. I mean I probably already have a site laid out. Do I really want to redesign the whole thing with vB's new CMS system?

And if I am a potential customer, we get to the problem where many sites will end up looking extremely similar. Just like vBAdvanced was awesome when it came out...the truth of the matter is that once it becomes popular...it just becomes another phpnuke type thing which everyone has and thus does not provide a unique perspective to the site.

Now, of course vBA is not a CMS - it's a portal. But you get the general idea.

I'm sure vB's CMS will be easy to customize and make your own, but i fear that sites will still end up looking very similar to eachother.



Anyways, I just hope there's much more other than the CMS for reasons I already stated. The new attachment system seems nice...but this just feels like some kind of Windows Vista type deal. We wait years and years and years for this flagship release...and at the end of the day I think it will be a disapointment.


At least they started making more blog posts though.


Basically I just wish they would focus on making the forums better.

P.S. One of the recent blog posts mentioned that they will be reverting to the postbit_legacy style but did not say whether or not the "new" (vb3 standard) style would be an option. I don't believe they got back to me when I asked.

I believe Wayne posts on these forums - do you know whether vb3 style postbit will be an option for vb4?

 

Since it will be div based and not table based, you can probably revert it to the vB3 style with two or three lines of CSS.

 

The new visual appearance alone, in my opinion, is exciting. After reading Kier's blog entry (linked above), I'm even more eager for v4.0's release.

 

Although it is one of the new features I am most excited for, I have to say, this crossed my mind, too.

I think it will be like anything else, though. Everyone using vBulletin had the same exact appearance at one point. If it was kept the way Jelsoft made it, we'd all appear to have the same forum. But that's not true - they've been highly customized, some to the point where you'd never know it is vBulletin... or even a forum. I think the same will happen with the CMS. People will dissect it.

 

This is an interesting statement, because I think each person has their own take on what most forum owners want. For myself I'm delighted they are adding CMS. It's exactly what I've been wanting, I'd rather use an integrated package than a lot of bolt-on pieces. Not least so that vB support isn't telling me "... that bit isn't ours and we don't support modifications, and the effects of modifications on un-modified code ... etc. "

Given that some established owners aren't interested in the vB CMS my guess is that it will be an optional addition.

There is a pov that forums are forums and there is no interest in any additional material for a forum site. But it seems that newer forums are more often including all kinds of other stuff including selling stuff, articles, classifieds, galleries, links pages and so on. This one is an example.

I think it depends on the site, there isn't a universal rule for what forums want and what they include. Some people want the CMS ... I think it's good that vB is responding.

It would be interesting to see what data vB used to create its development plan for vB 4. And how they gathered it - word of mouth, polls, interviews ... (I know that data is more confidential than the nuclear codes. )

 

There are 2 groups of customers actually...

1) Those who just want a forum software package for whatever reason. Originally this was the focus of our customer base.

2) Those who want a All-In-One package in a single platform. This is actually where new sales are predominately growing across the internet as far as community sites are concerned. This is the feedback we constantly get from our customers.

Going forward, I think vBulletin can fulfill both of these needs. The last pure forum version we sold was vBulletin 3.0.X.

Since 3.5, the package has been designed to fulfill a role as a community platform. This is where it shines because its easily to extend the platform. All the addons like GARS, LWT, Arcades, Shoutbox, vBAdvanced, and smaller ones at vBulletin.org build on this using the plugin and hook system in vBulletin. Over time it is only natural to expand the feature set so that it fulfills the needs of as many people as possible. Since most features are easy to turn off and use no resources when turned off then that enables us to continue to feed the needs of the marketplace.

The release of 4.0 will be the first step in providing an all-in-one solution with a single installation point. Wait until you see what happens in 4.1 and 4.2 though. Many things that people have been asking for years are not possible in vBulletin 3.X. They will eventually be possible in 4.X.

The first is the CMS. Now in my opinion, vBulletin has always been a strong CMS since the first day it was released. We were limited by calling it a forum and designing its style around that functionality. However with template edits on vBulletin 3.8, you have a CMS that is capable of supporting millions of articles with comments and other features. What popular CMS has stood up to that kind of abuse? In 4.0, we expand on our skills in content management to provide you with more tools, easier layouts and the ability to build your own article repository with forums and/or blogs on the side.

Beyond that vBulletin 4.0 will reduce your server load because you can finally move to InnoDB on the post and thread tables. No more table level locking.

You will be able to easily search amongst all content types (threads, articles, blogs, project tools, social groups, etc...).

There will be better integration of different portions in an style that is easy to modify and customize. Much easier than vBulletin 3.X which I think is easy as it is.

You will have better advertising management and better SEO capabilities.

Each one of these could have been a version on their own.

 

As I'm understanding it basically those in group 1 end up with a bloated piece of software, with a bunch of unnecessary code for *just a forum* to satisfy vBulletin's new customers. That doesn't seem all that fair, a CMS doesn't need to be that tightly integrated, it could be just a separate plugin. It looks to me like vB is just trying to poach some customers and more $$ from people who already make paid addons.

I think vBulletin should have looked at some popular open source projects like Joomla, Wordpress, etc and made a proper bridge then sell it as an add-on like the blogs and PT.

Since IB took over Jelsoft has only pushed crap, it started pre-IB with the template hooks for auto template editing which changed a number of times causing headaches with styles, to release today patch that release tomorrow, to utterly useless and poorly implemented social groups, and 'myspaceization' of profiles which is okay but again poorly implemented and finally anything good has been an upsell; paid add-ons like the blog and project tools. Nothing worthwild has come into vB for free since IB's acquisition. How about adding something worthwild, like I don't know a forum photo gallery (requested forever) or heaven forbid an intergrated and supported newsletter composition and sending feature?

Perhaps 4.0 will be worth the upgrade if only for CRU (content relevant URLs) and the new style but I'm afraid 4.0 is going to be the 'Vista' of vBulletin releases. And I suspect due to the expected changes to the licensing scheme, the 3.x branch won't be supported for long.

Don't get me wrong vBulletin is still a great product for running a forum, I'd still be happy running 3.6, frankly nothing added since has been worth uploading the files and running the upgrade script.

 

Can't legally interface with Wordpress or Joomla due to the GPL license and vBulletin's license being incompatible.

 

I didn't realize bridges fell under the GPL. Bridges do currently exist although not many of them seem to fully work, hence the need to have expert coders make one.

Don't get me wrong I'm not bashing vB, I've been a big fan of vB ever since I was a member on my first vB powered forum. As a admin, I always recommend vB to folks who want to start a forum, I've even gotten a couple of buddies to convert from a free package to vB, as of right now I'd tell people to hold off until the new licensing structure is solidified.

Anywho, I'm just being critical of vB which I think any good customer should be. Blind 'fanboyism' is just plain dumb, I mean come on we've all seen the Mac vs PC "debates" (flamer threads). :devil:

 

As Wayne said, you're in the minority, most people want feature packed, not feature-less.

 

Judging by all the threads on .com from people screaming and or demanding a cms, I'd say that something close to a majority is wanting more than just a forum nowadays.

 

I'm looking forward to seeing vB4's CMS, completed style updates, and the promised SEO. I currently have one vBSEO license, so I'm quite curious to see if the built-in SEO even comes close to meeting the features of vBSEO. I'd like to be able to optimize all my sites without having to pay the extra costs.

 

vBulletin 4 has built-in SEO friendly URLs, right?

 

I hope so! That'd be fantastic.

 

Human Readable URLs
XML Sitemap to submit to Google, Yahoo and MSN
New style with better emphasis on SEO such as thread titles in H1 tags and semantic layout.
Redefined linking for better indexing.

 

I may stand corrected but we'll see how many people actually pony up the extra $$ for the CMS and of those that do how many people actually use it for more than a front page.

 

I don't really care what they do with the CMS as I only need a forum.

I just wish the "forum-only" package was a free upgrade for people with active licenses (or at the very least, a very cheap price of maximum...like $20).

And for the love of good don't remove support tickets. That is just absurd. I think everyone expects personalized and amazing support for a product which costs almost $200.

And let's get real here: the new "free upgrade" scheme that vBulletin seems to be planning where the free upgrade only applies to the major version (i.e. vB 4.x.x license doesn't upgrade to vB 5.x.x for free) will give Jelsoft plenty of money that they are currently not making. No need to remove stuff we already have access to.

I will repeat: the new "free upgrades" system seems pretty fair but it is unfair to have it be retroactive. When I purchased my license I was told that it would grant me access to ALL future versions. There were no limits set. As such, I really do expect a free upgrade to vB4 if my license is active.

After that is set and done, then I fully understand having to pay for vB5; and in addition I fully understand that NEW purchases would be restricted to the "major" version number.


It's the right thing to do, really.


EDIT: Also, from what I have heard, Jelsoft will be pushing major versions out much quicker. I.E. it won't take 5 years to go from vB4-vB5 like it took to go from vB3-vB4. That is also something to consider when your free upgrades are only available for major versions. Old customers may think that it's an amazing deal since vB3 lasted for five-ish years. But if vB4 will only last for a year, maybe a year and a half...then suddenly the amazing deal becomes a little...well, less amazing.

IF vB4 does end up lasting close to five years, then I will gladly pay to upgrade to vB4 from my active vB3 license as the leaked post suggested. I'll happily pay for 3-5 years of free upgrades. I will be unhappy though if I am forced to pay $100+ every year/year and a half.

I think most people would agree with me.

 

Well, I'm pretty sure that all of the screaming for a cms came before they found out they'd have to pay a pretty penny for it. They got blindsided (thanks to that "leak") and now they're upset.

Can't blame them.