vBulletin Suite vs. vBulletin
 

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ohiosweetheart (Post 1764551)
Wait, just to be clear, members will not be able to purchase the blog and project tools separately, as they have been doing?

This is correct. Blog, Project Tools and CMS will not be distributed as separate products, but will be bundled with the vBulletin Suite.

In answer to some of the questions about this...

Why will these components only be available as part of the Suite?

There are two reasons for this change. The first is that with so many separate components, keeping them synchronized was unnecessarily inefficient from a coding standpoint. There's just too much engineering overhead to maintain them all on separate development tracks. And since we want to be able to develop quickly and get releases out to you more frequently, we made the decision to keep all components in sync as part of a single code base.

The second reason is that it provides much greater opportunities for tighter integration between the products, such as the ability to convert blog posts (or forum posts) to articles, to have forum discussions attached to CMS content, etc.

The whole idea is to make vBulletin better, faster, and these changes will help us develop new features more quickly. They will also help as we dive into the deeper round of rearchitecture with 4.1 and 4.2.

Does that mean I'll be running lots of extra code?

No. vBulletin runs only the code it needs for any given page load, so if you're not using a component, its code won't run and it won't impact the performance of the application.

Can I turn off components I don't want to use?

Yep, just turn them off from the Admin CP, and they'll be disabled.


More...

what if you have blogs and forums installed now ? how do you upgrade them to the suite?

Upgrades paths will be provided as we always have in the past.

vB4 is coming along nicely and I can't wait to see it, but one question comes to mind after reading this whole new "...bundled with the vBulletin Suite" idea.

Is the price of vBulletin going up now?

The pricing for the vB 4 products will change from the current setup. More info will be posted on vB.com once the new pricing structure is final.

Well, as far as I am concerned, this all makes good sense. I won't be using the Project Tools, but I do use the Blog system, and a nice CMS is a definite plus, especially as a native application rather than third-party add-on. I see the reasoning behind the bundling, and it really does make sense.

As for price rises, correct me if I am wrong, but overall vB compares very favourably indeed with other commercial software in price/capability measures, and has kept price rises low. I will be looking forward to vB 4!

Nice to see this get posted over here, although the first post is a great example of why vBulletin needs nested quotes back. But still, I'm going to assume the people that have the add ons would get an extra discount in some form, but there's nothing really official to comment on.

Oh great (NOT!). I presume this also means a pricing change again?

The pricing change stuff I think has been known for weeks now, if not months. It's been all over .com at least.

No that is the pricing change for normal vBulletin licenses and price changes for updates. Those were known for months and are already long time effective.

I'm talking about these:
And those were -not- known for months or weeks. At least these kind of announcements should be made by email to licensed users. Not everybody visit's the forums every week. I did not see anything in the announcement part of a rise.

I don't need all that other crap, and so do a lot of other people I guess. So there already was a price raise, and now we got another one.:(
And without the option to be able to only buy or renew only the forum software to version 4 if I understand correctly.
That is not the Lifetime!!! license I bought. I bought a lifetime forum license and I don't want to pay extra because some people in the office think they should put all unnecessary stuff to it which has nothing to do with a forum, like CMS, project, blog or whatever. Where is the legality on changing this lifetime license? My life isn't over yet. At least I hope.

I would like to see some explanation about that.
Because if I buy a windows license, Microsoft can't raise prices because they add a blog and a CMS and whatever. Remember the fine they got for embedding IE and Media Player?
I wonder.....

If that is all true, then where stays the client friendlyness of vBulletin.