Doubtful.
In the vBulletin CMS? Doubtful. It doesn't have anything to do with vBAdvanced.

Maybe he meant modules that provide similar functions ?

So far from the sounds of it this upgrade should be called vBulletin 3.9 not 4.0.

I am kind of disappointed with the announcement.

I'm worried it's becoming a jack of all trades, master of none. It was the best forum software about a year ago. I'm not so sure now. Hopefully search will improve from being the total embarrassment it is now.

I could do without cms/seo totally - I've seen vb's take on blogs so I dread to think what they think is a good cms. If the seo cuts down on stupid duplicate content then great - friendly urls don't bother me or google. Hopefully the improved templating system will make it easier to use the vb engine without their shitty bodywork.

SEO...finally. Im too broke to afford vbSEO :P

My point is the attitude (apparently mind you) that we bring nothing to the table and have no reason to expect to be participants in development is a major concern.

At some point, "participation" begins to blur the line between that and "developer". They've taken our requests into consideration, that's why a lot of the desired features are being added. But we can only be so involved before our "participation" becomes counterproductive.

I hope it will be easy to convert the style's..

I think having a program with select design alpha/beta testers makes good business sense. Those of us who produce designs for a living and focus on that aspect of vBulletin have a unique insight into the needs of the vB end user and market trends that vB won't have. Strengthening this relationship can only benefit each party while inaction does nothing but damage the skin producers.

simple answer: nope.. prepare yourself right now, ask your designer to transform your style to be simplier based on CSS... and you will have ease of transfer then.

styles with millions of tables is so obsolete anyway, if you have a complex design, it's not only because of vB 4.0 that you have to redesign, but because of the web itself.

My suggestion for vbulletin with this new release is to create a simple program since there already adding a cms why not make it easier for designers to design a skin. I was thinking about creating a mod that has pre-instlled xml style files with there images with an enhanced style control panel to make adding or making your own styles easier. Php has its own build in image abilities why not create a program that can be used soley for the purpose of creating skins? If the cms is as bad as advanced or vbportal is then that will be a let down i expect much more from the forum software leaders then crappy coding. No offence to there coders at all but why code something that looks almot just like your forum? My advice to vbulletin is to create a seperate style system for the cms no on wonts a borad the looks just like there main site and if they add a feature to add a new banner per page then that my friends would be awesome. Just some food for thought and i hope they keep the coders/designers bette informed f the code chages so we can get our mods ported to 4.0 faster and smoother then we can now.

My two cents:

Give us better templating. A file based option would seriously speed up development on my end. I am open to any suggestions though.

Expand on the albums. Anything, and I mean ANYTHING that can put photopost in the grave would make me happy. It has become one of my biggest foes lately.

And thank god for the SEO! Not that VBSEO has been a nightmare, they are actually quite good at what they do, it is just another step when it comes time to upgrade. How nice it would be to eliminate that, especially when your someone like me who is usually tasked with upgrading about 20 different forums.

Integration API. Would be nice if there was something in place to make integrations with other software easier.

A CMS product. I know this is separate from VB, but I bet if you counted heads, there are more people trying to use some sort of CMS than VBSEO. It is an untapped market, and could be served well by Jelsoft.

Looking forward to 4.0!

suggestions are useless people, don't you understand that you're in the bad place for that?!

you can be happy or sad, but it's pointless to whinne or suggest anything to be added... the roadmap is written, and they are always answering clients requests -- the ones made on the official forum for ages...

That where I think you hugely mistaken, nexialys. Roughly 90% of the features that have been added to vBulletin over the years has been from customer feedback. What you guys have been suggesting is in depth conversations with vBulletin, which even I don't think is a good idea. But just because they don't make the customer a "backseat developer" doesn't mean they aren't listening to suggestions being made. That's a huge misconception. They're listening. Just not in the way you'd like.

As Nexia said, this is the wrong place for suggestions. It's been said several times that the developers do not come over here and therefore they won't see any suggestions posted here. There is a suggestion forum over at vb.com

Did you actually read the announcement?

--------------- Added 17 Dec 2008 at 10:31 ---------------

Yes, but you need to make suggestions at www.vbulletin.com. Developers rarely if ever visit vb.org.

<<and I really hate this auto-merge thing... just to let you know.>>

actually, i have a version of auto-merge that give a checkbox to usergroupsid that let them choose to auto-merge or not...

(sadly, nobody wants me to rebuild this site.. lol)

Well, this sucks, I was really into the total rewrite.

i can do it for you if you wish... complete rewrite of vB is not complicated... give me 5 minutes and everything will be messed out and uncontrolable... :)

True, I was merely addressing the insinuation that the developers don't listen at all.

They said it would be new backend code, just over the course of the 4.0 series, not all at once.

Keir isn't Project Manager at Jelsoft any longer...some new guy at IB is and is heading this up...lovely turn of events that don't paint a rosy picture no matter how much of a fanboy/fangirl you are of vB.

That is very sad news. As i posted at vb.com i definately will start checking other solutions more as i dont trust IB guys abilities on building a software like vB. When i think about the major events after Ib take over Jelsoft , I can't even find one single good point. So i believe the best option is to find a better solution.

/me raise hand... HEY LIZ, I'M HERE !!!

The first step in SEO for Jelsoft lol

Great stuff jelsoft finally implementing seo. I won't have to purchase vbseo. Boy, was i the smart one holding off all these years :rolleyes:

all these improvements sound great - im excited to be started a couple new forums as these changes are being implemented... thanks Jsoft!

I understand the AllAlbums add in will be part of 4.0. This is good news. There is however one VERY LARGE hole in this feature that I think a lot of us would like to see fixed. The pics that are posted in a thread NEED to be the same pic that is in an album. Otherwise the albums are useless. People upload pics to show their stuff in a thread. If they can't show the pic in a thread and only in an album the album is useless.

So someone goes to make a post and wants a pic in the thread. That pic should go into the post AND be in their album. In a perfect world that pic would also have a category selected from a list. Then the pic can be viewed in the post, in the album for that user and in an album of the name listed from the pull down category. The pic is stores once and a database reference in 3 spots---- sounds easy to me.

Pretty please - cream and sugar on top!!!

Are you suggesting attachments also going into the user's albums upon upload? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't attachments and albums stored seperatly?

100% agree on that one.

Waste of server space

Also consider this example: in times of SQL there is no need to waste server space by uploading the same thing twice if not really necessary. 10 times a 5mb picture produces some sweet 50mb overload - and server space is expensive.

I think that vb is fighting irish with its legacy - the will to be a tool for geeks 1st. ;)

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As far as pictures are concerned his point is valid.

As long as there is no real media library like in Wordpress I would handle mp3s etc. different.

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Well, I doubt that vb is going to put in the elaborated SEO stuff vbSEO features so far. Usually by vb implemented features which are available for years via addons are only basic features in comparison to its competitor.

Maybe vb got the edge over vbSEO because they develop the main code, but if you really stick to Google's SEO guide which take basic things into account you have to change more than only enabling mod_rewrite.

I am excited what the new SEO features will look like.

From 3.6 to 3.7 to 3.8 in such a short time... and they have been working on 4.0. Why?! Why not stick with 3.6 and then just go straight to 4.0 but that's besides the point!

Anyway... I hope that when they bring this 4.0 in they allow you to just keep Members, Forums and Posts... nothing else. I don't want to import all the other settings... just the Members, Forums and Posts.
If not I can see myself getting a little frustrated but I'm sure it will all be well worth it. I'm looking forward to seeing the new "look" that 4.0 will have... hopefully more "web2.0" than vB3 series.

I'm glad I renewed my licence so I can get 4.0, and hopefully from the first (beta) release (early Q2 209 I hope) until the first (stable) release I hope that is only a maximum of two months. I think alot of people will be on board testing and submitting bug reports so that should speed things up I would expect.

Thanks Jelsoft... you reign supreme yet again!

We don't really get uploads other than pics - but now that you bring it up... yeah I think that would work just fine - store it all in the abums.

I wonder what the CMS is going to look like. I already have vB integrated with Wordpress. Considering the amount of content it's going to have [which is loads] by the time 4.0 is released, I'm wondering if it'll be worth switching over to, depending on what the vB CMS looks like & how it functions.

I'm not too worried about styles. I hope someone will convert the Retro Blue & Wild West styles though.

All i know is that we took a style we found and totally re customized it to fit our forums. Mainly made it look more macish. The 4.0 upgrade is gonna be a tough one. It will require alot of work on our ends and alot of our custom mods won't work.

Maybe you shouldn't upgrade. There are other boards that have been customized to the point where if they upgraded, it would just screw everything up.

Edit: question for creators about styling: since CSS will be involved, does this mean we won't need hacks that allow us to make profiles look more like Facebook/Myspace?

Heavily modified boards just means that you have to do a lot more preparation for an upgrade.

All CSS will do is change the way the HTML is displayed. It's just more efficient. The only thing it will change is the way styles are designed on the backend.

man im so excited, i just cant hide it.. ... :D

wonder if they will make that vb cms finally, thats long over due..

i was thinking not to continue my vb subscription.. but hmm might just continue anyway.
with the news of the major changes in vb4

Interesting. I work well with CSS, so I'll be looking forward to this.

I think that would be awesome if user attachments were simply placed into the users albums.

The problem I see to have is people upload them into both the posts and into their albums.

Indeed... a centralized storage of attachments/albums into users account.

Check out the recent developers blog on this topic. You will like it. ;)