Praise & Hate for VB3
 

Well I moved to VB3 beta 7 too. And I've been trying to pluge my old templates into the new system and boy oh boy is it a pain.

I love VB3, they have simplified a lot of things, and the control panel is so much easier and well orginized to use than the old.

But is it me or what, but they did such a good job cleaning up the messy code in the templates that now its even harder to customize your styles when you want to escape the VB look.

I've noticed 10x as many if, but and "and" (pardon the pune) commands in the templates itself. And some things are now hard coded.

Whew. :) But it certainly fun.

Whats your thoughts. How deeply has anyone modified there VB3 already?

No hacks for now since its still beta.

Well, I'm not even trying to install VB3, cause it's still beta, not even release

www-lab thats a stupid move IMO. you should have vb3 betaX installed some wheere to get acustomed to it, ive been running my board live and without problems since beta 4 ;). vb2 isnt stable either, nothing is 100% stable, and just because its beta means nothing. the product has been really good since beta 5/6. i have quite a few sites running in production with beta X.

ive hacked and customized my templates to do what i want them to, ive released 2 skins ones currently being redone for vb3 beta 7 :)

ive made more and just not released them.

vb3 kills vb2. in both customazation and power.

i refuse to even do vb2.x work now because of how in-efficent it is. with the template condtitonals, i can do so much more than what was possible before, with out hacking it, which to me is a huge plus. its much ezier to update my templates over rehacking files.

Don't tell me what's stupid or not. I can test vb3 after release.

Can I decide?

you should be testing it now, on a dev box or somthing, by the time its into rc1 (chrismas~) youll be far behind everyone eles who already knows the ins and outs of vb3. which will be essential for a quick conversion ;)

lol, u're funny

I gotta go with Faranth here, I started beta testing for vB3 since Beta 3.. I started vB2 a few months before that. I am so blown away at how much easier Beta 3 was to learn that I don't think I've logged into my vB2 AdminCP for my local box in weeks. Hell, I'm in my vB3 AdminCP right as I'm typing this working on some customizations :D

vB3 is an amazing piece of software, The devs have just blown me away. I can wait till xmas, because I know every day we wait is for the better..

Regards,
Patrick

I've made full hacks (an entire points system) and added around 10 templates, modified many too. No problems or complaints.

Works well enough for me, the conversion between Beta 6 and Beta 7 was not that hard to be honest, just reworking some of the HTML to include the new variables in use; which I will add, is a much better method than in the past.

I cannot say much about hacking vBulletin 3, but from the templates side, I find it just as easy and a lot nicer to work with. If users did not use vBulletin 2.0 still, I would only develop for vBulletin 3.0 since you can do so much more with it.

Hey, I was wondering if anybody here that has a good understanding of all the $vboptions $userinfo, etc variables could help me out! I want to start writing these things but I don't want to have to dive deep into the code to get this information. If anybody is willing to help me out (I'll pay if we can consider it a tutoring session) please contact me :)

Regards,
Patrick

Well its been 5 days for me. I'm liking it. Just getting adjusted to the changes. Sure does make things easier. I love it.

Just getting a handle for it.

It takes some getting used to before you can say it's easier to modify the vB3 templates. I've modified it quite heavily through some styles and it's not harder or anything like that. :)

I am waiting for the final version to be released before I even touch styles, or vB3 for that matter. It will be a real pain as I have about 5 heavily modified styles to convert :(.

-Paul

Well, you are permitted to have a copy of vbulletin running in a tucked away location that is not open to public for development purposes. I don't know what it can possibly hurt to install it and take a look to see what things are like. Try things out.

Trust me, no one will get hurt if you toy with vb3 on a non production level.

fyi, not installing a copy some where now is going to kill you when you have to learn all the new varibles for porting thos 5 heavly modify styles ;)

Just think of it as a chance to think up some new and refreshing styles and designs, look how this site changed from VB2.

Change is good :)

I plan on sticking with b7 until it goes gold. I hate updating templates on each release, and i have had NO problems with beta 7.


Well worht an install in a dev directory

I hate the vB3 admin panel look - it's worse than ever ...

how can you say that. the new acp is killer ^_^

*smack*

You don't know how to appriciate things as they are.
I moved to vb3, and am not looking back no more.
the new acp has so much more to use and in a better overview and quicker and easier to jump around in.
Definitly worth it, especially the debug modus and the way styles and languages are managed, such an improvement.

hopefully, when vB3 goes final, the devs might have devised an upgrade script from 2.3.x or 2.2.x? yes? hopefully so we can port as much of the old styles as possible without messin it all up. If they can do that, i'll definately upgrade to vB3 when it goes gold or when *if* they release an upgrade script. :D

wtf do you mean upgrade script?

its called upgrade.php and it upgrades your forum to 3.0.0 and i VERY HIGLY doubt they will ever make somthing to port your styles as coding and tons and tons of templates have been redone and are now sepearated and made differnt, the eziest way for you to move to vb3 is to upgrade and make your new vb3 look like your old one. its not hard ^^

hmm... well i'll atleast wait for them to redo the templates of vB3 before i consider upgrading :/

if plug spark forums is yours, that style wouldnt take much more than 5-10 min to reproduce on vb3 ^^

well notice im not done *obviously* >_> + i'd loose all my hacks n stuff

what hacks are you worried about losing?

Use a comparing program if you're upgrading hacks from one vB2 version to another. That way you can keep all your hacks.

Beyond Compare is a good start.

well tony you should know theres a large difference

He is referring to vB 2 -> vB 2 upgrades, there is to great a code differnce between vB 2 to vB 3 to upgrade and keep the hacks. So much has changed, template caching, calling templates, template structer, not to mention to lang. options, file structer changes and that the coding standards have changed in both html and php.

Honestly if you havent upgraded yet I dont think its wroth upgrading to beta 7, RC 1 is due soon and there will be a RC 2, you can count on that. I hope you are all looking forward to updating your modifications for the new style :cool:

i hit submit too soon lol ^^

the new style should be worth it ^^ altho id alteast have a test installtion some where to learn your way around

I started to play with VB3 Beta 2, then just upgraded to VB3 Beta 7 recently, of couse on my computer only. Once RC1 is out then i will decided if i should upgrade or not. Basicly im using it to get to know how it runs and such...

Thats all im doing to, I dont even have a live vBulletin installation atm. :)

The only thing i'm hating about VB3 is the fact I can't hack it yet and there's nowhere to buy templates!
It's driving me crazy XD hacking is fun kinda. Makes me feel evil.

you cant buy many template sets however you can contact people to design a specific one,


actually i belive corey wojen made a skin for vb3, and vbulletinstyles.com has sets as well ^^

Mmhmm I know ^.^ but it's not worth buying them til RC is out anyway. I'm planning on getting a custom one, if i knew and owned Adobe i'd have no trouble making one myself because of all the awesome mods people have posted here ^.^

I just want to be able to hack so badly. One of my friends has already decided to port his hack for VB3 he just can't finish it yet >.<