I went live with my new site the other day. It's using the latest release of vbportal. The response on my site has been nothing but positive. You can check it out over at www.highaltitudeimports.com or hit the main index directly at www.haiparts.com/index.php !

when was portal 3.0 released?

It hasn't been. However, all you have to do to get a copy is donate 20 dollars to the site and you can have access to all of teh downloads and support. This is only the case untill the software is released, but it looks like that may not be untill vbulletin 3.0 comes out. Either way I thought it was worth it to pay 20 dollars for something with this ammount of work put into it..

$20 is way too expensive for a vB extension.

It's quite a bit more than an extension. The ammount of code these guys have written to make this happen is unreal. The webmaster over there spends a heck of a lot of his time answering questions and pushing the product forward. It's a free add on if you wait untill it's released, but IMO it's worth it to help support someone that has poured so much time into something. I know after the many many hours I have spent on my site I would welcome a small donation for my own effort...