[sabret00the]

GENERAL UPDATE: Development slowed a whole lot for various different reasons and i missed my target to take 3.0 to beta. Development has now sped up once more. However i'm not quite at a stage as to give another projected ETA for either beta, RC or Gold. Should i get back into the swing of things i'll try and sort that out for you all.

To give you some idea of where i'm at. Most of the front end functionality is now complete. I'm going to finish off the posting type stuff (viewing threads, making posts, editing posts, making new threads) next (most of that is done, but alas i'm tweaking and that might have a knock on effect.

The next port of call will then be the back-end. I'm really wanting to make the link rewriting and automated, graceful, professional and GUI driven. In it's current form 3.x using an XML to do link lookups and replacements and so the onus on me will be to make sure that's easily editable via the admincp.

After that i'm then onto the admincp in whole. Just basically making new versions of the current pages that encompass the new functionality. This step may actually come after the beta (well the depth of it anyway) so i know exactly what users may want to edit.

From there, it's about tighter integration. People have requested RSS's (not sure what you'd all want them to show. Answers greatly appreciated) and search integration. The latter is my preference and could be the key to making most of you happy in one swoop, so one eye is one that from now.

Then i guess we're onto would be the installer. Thus far i've had a lot of complaints about the lack instructions, installer. So i'm going to make that a lot easier on everyone and basically wrap it all up in a pretty little bun.

After all that i'm going to move onto tweaking the gallery images. I'm considering cropping resized thumbnails to make them uniform in size instead of just resizing them and leaving so much to variance. However i've not decided yet. But alas this will probably definitely come after beta.

Your only real enemy for progress in regards to 3.0 is paid work. Given the time of year, it's excellent to have a little extra in my pocket so i'm always on the lookout as far as that goes. but it's a fairly straight forward process right now and most, if not all of my stresses in regards to technical problems holding this up are in the past.

Anything you feel i might've forgotten, feel free to open up for discussion. For all of those waiting for 3.0 and showing support as a few of you have. I'm really grateful and i really hope to make you happy with 3.0. Though i bet you, i get a wave of complaints due to the fact that i move away from vBulletin's way of handling things on quite a few different aspects of 3.0. For some it's bad, for me, it's about adding it's own presence and hopefully it'll be a direction that vBulletin takes, but ultimately i feel it's best for the product in the long run.