Has vBullentin change the acope of the bb with V4 into a programmer project?

[bbalas]

i upgraded from V3.8.1 to V4.0.2 after this upgrade i lost all the customizations to the bb. i have upgraded from previous versions without a problem and without losing the customizations. I now have a very angry client. i posted a question yesterday and was pointed to a 3rd party customizer. all i really wanted to do was change the VBullentin logo to my clients logo and change the colors to match my clients current web site. i noticed that all those features are not longer available.
Is this the new normal where you need to go to a third party to customize this software if you are not a coder?
is there a way to go back to the previous version?
what direction is Vbullentin going to go to in the future open source programmer required?
are they moving away from the user friendly and maintained parameters?

Is there no user freindly documentation for V4? or only the online programmer documentation?

Please Help as i am going to loose a customer if i do not come up with some answers

thanks Bob

[Reeve of shinra]

In the past you could keep most of your modifications and customized templates during incremental upgrades (ie: 3.8.1 to 3.8.4).

That said, all mods had to be recoded when we went from vb2 to vb3 and many changes were required from 3.0 to 3.5. Some minor changes were required for the jump from 3.5 to 3.6 to 3.7 and 3.8 but as the code base remained fairly similar - it wasn't to big of a challenge to port the mods to the new version.

It was expected, and often mentioned, that the jump from 3.x to 4 would require a re-write of the modifications and templates. Unfortunately this error is on you here.

Where we (as customers) are uncertain, and where the vb team needs to step up, is about the changes that will break functionality between point releases in the vb4 series (ie: 4.0.1 to 4.0.2). That's a whole other mess and you can read about it in the many threads on vb.com.

Can you go back to 3.8? Only if you have a backup of the 3.8 database and are willing to lose anything added since then.

Going forward, it will be a good idea to test your upgrades first, including the minor updates during the early phases of vb4.