1 Yr Later: Is vB4 Better than vB 3.8?

[metalguy639]

Originally Posted by Alfa1

With 1000 bugs, and little functionality improvement in vb4 I see no reason to upgrade.
If the CMS gets fixed up that may change though.

Agreed 100%. To answer the original poster's question....No.

[Eruantien]

4.0 was been somewhat of a mess for me. I realize my experience may vary from others, but it has been a nightmare managing my site and trying to sort through countless bugs to get rudimentary functionality. I am now searching for a reason why I can't upload images via the CMS to articles. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to fix these small issues.

[conradk]

I agree that Attachment and Album/Gallery stinks. My users have mostly given up. Album handling is terrible. Needs much better pic display features.

The forum is slower than 3.8 and uses more memory/bandwidth. Page loading is slower overall.
Search is inconsistent and mostly unusable.

BUT it is mostly stable now and is what developers are working on.
And I feel like there are fewer security issue/updates.

My approach is to stay a few versions behind now to see what happens, and wait to see what mods are updated.
We're currently running 4.0.8 (just updated).

[shaqoneal]

thanks so much for your feedback. I will stick with 3.8 then and maybe for years to come.

[mccollin]

I'm actually glad in one sense that some of you are writing it off. It will create some differentiation for those who have 3.8 vs. those with 4.x. I hope my competitors decide not to upgrade, quite frankly. I'm actually quite pleased with my site right now. I have gotten rid of a bunch of custom stuff because of the CMS and its working very well for me. The whole site looks fresh and new, and it was minimal work to get it that way. And the more I get into the CSS, the easier I'm finding it to tweak things the way I want.

The biggest improvement I'd like to see is that they integrate the integrate the widgets, forum blocks, and blog sidebar blocks so that its all one architecture. And, I'd like to see more ad management places for articles to be placed, OR, a simple way to drop in your own placement locations into templates, but still manage them via the ad management tool.

But I can certainly work around both of these for now.

The

[conradk]

I don't think I'd advise slowing down your upgrade that much. Given the stability of 4.0.8, I'd say upgrade. The upgrade isn't trivial however. Backup and duplicate your database, and test the upgrade on a new directory to see how it goes.

I caught quite a bit of flack from my users for upgrading the site. I upgraded too early in the 4.x release and should have waited. However, like I said, I have avoided many issues by slowing down the update timeline (unlike 3.8.x update timelines which was driven mostly be exploits). I have not yet enabled CMS and Blog due to some of the bugs that existed in previous versions but will likely do so soon.

A good CSS refresh will freshen up your site just as much as the vBulletin upgrade, so I disagree re: the competitive advantage. Content is what drives site popularity.

[shaqoneal]

so you are saying 4.0.8 is stable?

Just forums alone, because that's all I want (not CMS or blog), is 3.8.6 faster and less resourc-intensive than 4.0.8?

[TNCclubman]

Im still using vB3.8. Too scared to use vB4 on a live environment as its full of bugs.

[Sarteck]

I don't really make much use of the CMS feature, and I could live with or without Blogs, tbh.

With vB 3.8.x, things were a lot easier to handle, especially when it came to design. There wasn't six dozen StyleVars for a heading--you had thead and tcat and other stuff that you could set in ONE PLACE and have it be uniform throughout the entire site. In this vB4, no such luck--if you want to make your own Style(s), you have to sit down and one-by-one see which StyleVar does what to which parts of the page, and half the StyleVars seem to simply not work at all (case in point, see my recent thread about trying to change the background colour of the Profile Sidebar).

And the Search... Gah. Don't get me started... Well, it's really no worse than vB3, I suppose, but in vB3, we were able to replace it with Sphinx. Trying to do so for vB4 met with utter failure.

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.

[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