[In Omnibus]

Originally Posted by nhawk

In general, vB5 was a terrific idea that was poorly executed.

Fortunately the simple solution is, kill the vB5 site and switch to vB4. There are a couple thousand add-ons available for vB4 that might meet your needs. And many people will do custom development for it.



I wouldn't hold your breath, vB5 was released 4 years ago and it took this long to get where it is today. So, that should give you an idea of how quickly (or not) things happen.

Agreed on vB5. If they'd waited on releasing the product until it was what it is now they'd have have much more positive reaction. Even so, it has far more possibilities for a complete website in a 21st century social media environment than does vB4. Every element of every page is customizeable. That's a perfect concept, even if the actual implementation left much to be desired.

Insofar as vB4 is concerned, there are countless mods however there are also countless mods which have been left to rot. All of the most prominent developers not employed by vBulletin left. Some of those modifications are six years old, unsupported, have outdated code written for what are now deprecated versions of PHP, MySQL, HTML4 transitional, CSS2.0, JS libraries which are no longer even in repository, etc.

Even so I have constructed dozens of sites with vB4.x in the last twelve months.

What it truly comes down to is what best meets the needs of a site. Are the forums the central hub of the site or a feature? Are the forums the "landing page" or are they on a link or tab? Is the site sales driven or content driven? Is it paid membership or free? Is it advertisement heavy or ad-free? So many questions.

Any version of the software can be made to do anything, depending upon how one wants to tackle it. There are still many sites using vB3.x versions which are so heavily customized that they will never change major software versions.

If you can get vB4.x to do what you want with existing modifications it's certainly the path of least resistance.

If you're having to pay someone to do the coding to obtain the features and functions you want I would personally recommend staying with vB5 because it's going to remain actively developed for the foreseeable future whereas vB4 is six years old and will likely be updated only for security patches.

In fact, I think if the vB5 release had gone as planned vB4 would have been declared EOL by now.

What I would do, and what I actually do for my clients, is to develop a prototype of the site in both versions and see which I find best meets their needs. That might seem time-consuming but you're trying to get it right, not trying to get it right now.