[brandondrury]

I'm still in upgrade-mode, but I've committed to vb4. Getting the theme right has been astronomically more time consuming than I had expected. (BTW, I HIGHLY recommend Opera's "Inspect Element" feature. It smokes Firebug by a zillion.) I gave up on the Style vars and just made my changes in additional.css and that saved me a few days of cussing. Seriously.

It's clear that the admin side of the CMS is not nearly as mature as Wordpress. That's okay, Wordpress is almost 10 years old or something.

Ideally, a fully and perfectly integrated Wordpress with vb 3.8 would be what I would want. However, I played with the mods for those and it was always clunky. So I never really considered that an option. I can't count the number of times I had to figure out how to get the two kids to play nice together (the two kids being vb and Wordpress) or had to perform redundant tasks with differing code.

I used RSS the best I could to more or less "join" the two worlds, but it was always half-cocked at best. Seeing what vB4 is capable of in this department was the big seller for me. They've got this "joining" thing right, at least from the visitor perspective.

For what I need, vB4 is ready to go. I'm really counting on a few contests on my part dramatically escalating the quantity and organization of user activity. We'll see. If I fail, I don't think it's the fault of vB4.

As mentioned, the current theme system of stylevars is something you'd expect from 1998 and is clearly not something that much thought went into.....at least not by a progressive kind of mind.

Seeing "critical" or "high priority" bugs from 4 month sago that still haven't been dealt with has been disappointing.

I seriously considered going with another platform, but I'm still convinced that vB with vbSEO is as good as it gets. It's what my users like, I rank very well in SEs. I can't really complain. I'll have to fight an unideal admin and unideal learning curve in the blog/CMS, but it'll be worth it, I think.

Built-in Facebook integration looks very fun.

I'll most likely be developing my own intensive-tracking system for marketing purposes as well as an intense per-user incentive mod.

I'm really hoping that the vB4 development team will step up their game, tie up all the loose ends, and start applying cutting edge thinking to future features. If not, I'll just have to do it myself.

Maybe it's my inexperience, stupidity, or plain Bad Luck, but vB4's been a lot more of a headache for us than vB3 ever was.

Upgrading for me has been a TOTAL headache. Of course, I'm guessing switching an active community over to a new platform is ALWAYS this way. There are many technical hurdles, but I think the user side is better than anything else out there.

Brandon