The vB team is happy to announce that we have updated vBulletin.com with the latest snapshot from our development trunk. The next milestone in the development of vB4 will vBulletin 4.0 RC1 and will be available for download by licensed customers on Friday, December 11.

What are the new fixes and features?

• (new) Added a forum sidebar to highlight content from blogs, cms articles and group discussions.
• Improved UTF-8 issues
• Fixed more RTL bugs
• Fixed more IE 6 compatibility issues
• about 100 more bug fixes

When is the gold release scheduled?

Our plan is to ship Gold during the week of December 21. Starting on the date of the Gold Release, vBulletin 4.0 Forums and Publishing Suite will become officially supported products. That means that it will be eligible for both ticket support (for 30 days with Forums, and for the life of the version for the Publishing Suite) and phone support (if you've purchased it).

Are there still known bugs in this release candidate?

Yes, all software releases have bugs. However, we have reached the point in the development of vB4 where it satisfies our release criteria and the remaining bugs are not serious enough to hold up release. We will, however, continue to fix known bugs in order of priority.

To put this in perspective, some of the most widely used software in the world runs in millions of production sites despite having queues of hundreds or thousands of minor bugs. For example, see the bug trackers for Java and Apache.

What will the schedule of maintenance releases be?

In parallel with working on new features for 4.1, our highest priority after the Gold release is to provide frequent updates. We will release maintenance builds immediately after the Gold release. Our first two scheduled maintenance releases are:

• 4.01 maintenance release. The Week of January 4 - 8.
• 4.02 maintenance release. The Week of January 18 - 22.

We're happy to announce the release of vBulletin 4.0 Beta 5.

The reason this release has not been designated a release candidate as originally planned is that it includes several new features, including:

• improved RTL support for Arabic and Hebrew
• an enhanced site map for CMS and Blog
• additional style vars for Forums
• ... numerous new bug fixes, and more.

These features require a proper beta cycle, hence the B5 designation.

Please see Don's blog post for additional details.

We are excited to announce a major milestone on the path to vB4 - the release of Beta 3 to all customers who have purchased (or upgraded to) the new vBulletin 4.0 Forum or Publishing Suite licenses.

Cool!

Yes, yes it is. :cool:

We are very excited about hitting this stage of development, and while there's more work yet to be done, we're very happy to finally get the product into the hands of the larger customer base.

Can we run Beta 3 in production?

The official answer is that you may run this beta release on public sites, but we don't recommend it. If you put it in production, make sure to back up all of your data and files before upgrading.

Please remember that there is no official support for vB4 until the Gold release, so if you decide to put it in production, you're taking all of the usual risks of using beta-stage software. This means that there are still known bugs, some of which might be significant to your members, depending on how they use the software.

Is there anything we should be especially careful of?

New, fresh installations have been relatively predictable, but we have experienced some potentially serious issues upgrading existing vBulletin installations, depending on customization, configuration and certain aspects your database. In particular, disable all of your plugins before attempting upgrades.

Some things to check before upgrading, especially if you are setting up a test site from a copy of your production site.

1) Make sure that the forum URL setting is correct.

2) If attachments are stored on the file system, make sure that the test site points to a valid attachment directory that is different from the production site's directory.

3) Make sure that any attachment files from the production site get copied to the test site directory.

Where do we report bugs?

In the usual bug tracker - here.

Will my existing styles and plug-ins work?

Please see this FAQ entry.

When will the gold release be?

The Gold release will come once all of our release criteria have been satisfied. At this time, we expect Gold to be released before the end of the year.

We are excited to announce a major milestone on the path to vB4 - the release of Beta 3 to all customers who have purchased (or upgraded to) the new vBulletin 4.0 Forum or Publishing Suite licenses.

Cool!

Yes, yes it is. :cool:

We are very excited about hitting this stage of development, and while there's more work yet to be done, we're very happy to finally get the product into the hands of the larger customer base.

Can we run Beta 3 in production?

The official answer is that you may run this beta release on public sites, but we don't recommend it. If you put it in production, make sure to back up all of your data and files before upgrading.

Please remember that there is no official support for vB4 until the Gold release, so if you decide to put it in production, you're taking all of the usual risks of using beta-stage software. This means that there are still known bugs, some of which might be significant to your members, depending on how they use the software.

Is there anything we should be especially careful of?

New, fresh installations have been relatively predictable, but we have experienced some potentially serious issues upgrading existing vBulletin installations, depending on customization, configuration and certain aspects your database. In particular, disable all of your plugins before attempting upgrades.

Some things to check before upgrading, especially if you are setting up a test site from a copy of your production site.

1) Make sure that the forum URL setting is correct.

2) If attachments are stored on the file system, make sure that the test site points to a valid attachment directory that is different from the production site's directory.

3) Make sure that any attachment files from the production site get copied to the test site directory.

Where do we report bugs?

In the usual bug tracker - here.

Will my existing styles and plug-ins work?

Please see this FAQ entry.

When will the gold release be?

The Gold release will come once all of our release criteria have been satisfied. At this time, we expect Gold to be released before the end of the year.

The Beta release of vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite here on vBulletin.com has been updated to include the all-new CMS component.

The public view of the CMS is the same as users on your site would see. At the moment, most of the CMS is populated with simple lorem ipsum placeholder content. The intent of this is to present examples demonstrating various page layouts, built-in and third-party widgets, preview images, navigation, etc. Additionally, the first articles describe the elements of CMS pages and how they are created.

We haven't opened up the administrative functions here, since that would require giving public access to the Admin CP.

How will we use the CMS on vBulletin.com?

Over the coming weeks, we will begin using the CMS to publish product information, tutorials, documentation and more.

How complete is this version of the Publishing Suite?

Please remember we are still in beta. There are known bugs, which we are fixing as quickly as possible. When you find bugs, you can help us by reporting them in the 4.0 bug tracker.

Enjoy!

The Beta release of vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite here on vBulletin.com has been updated to include the all-new CMS component.

The public view of the CMS is the same as users on your site would see. At the moment, most of the CMS is populated with simple lorem ipsum placeholder content. The intent of this is to present examples demonstrating various page layouts, built-in and third-party widgets, preview images, navigation, etc. Additionally, the first articles describe the elements of CMS pages and how they are created.

We haven't opened up the administrative functions here, since that would require giving public access to the Admin CP.

How will we use the CMS on vBulletin.com?

Over the coming weeks, we will begin using the CMS to publish product information, tutorials, documentation and more.

How complete is this version of the Publishing Suite?

Please remember we are still in beta. There are known bugs, which we are fixing as quickly as possible. When you find bugs, you can help us by reporting them in the 4.0 bug tracker.

Enjoy!

With the upcoming release of our new vBulletin 4.0 software products, we have introduced corresponding new licensing and pricing structures. Overall, reaction from our customers has been very positive, as evidenced by record-setting sales.

Introducing new products is challenging, especially for a wide and well-established customer base, such as we have with vBulletin. A small but vocal group of impassioned vBulletin enthusiasts has expressed some concern and confusion about these new developments. We are listening and have made a number of modifications in response. Our purpose with this communication, including the amended FAQ's, is to explain our rationale behind these new licensing and pricing structures and to illustrate their benefits.

The new structure is designed to create incentives for the more rapid feature-releases of our software products, allowing for a more dynamic line of products. The pricing is structured to provide these new features at very competitive price points. The pre-sale event was designed to reward our current, loyal vBulletin customers with the option to get these new features at a significant savings.

Our customer base is more than 100,000 strong. We designed and aggressively discounted the price of the new vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite with the aim of providing the best product at the best price to as many of our customers as possible. The Suite offers a compelling value: it encompasses a a platform to support Forums, Blogs and new modules for community publishing, customer support and all future 4.0 software updates for the life of the product.

We believe vBulletin continues to provide an exceptional software value with these new products: an individual license is priced at the cost of just a few hours of development.

We hope this additional information and the newly updated FAQ's provide some clearer answers. We are listening.

Visit the updated vBulletin FAQ.

We decided to take some extra time before bringing the forums back up after the upgrade to 4.0. Briefly, here's what happened.

First, the good news: The installation of 4.0 itself actually went as planned. The upgrade to 4.0 Publishing Suite from the 3.8.4 base product was seamless, and that agrees with the success the alpha/beta team has seen up to this point.

The issues we encountered were related to the fact that the instance of vB running on vBulletin.com has integration points with various business systems: administration, release management, ticket support, the product information site, and more. Cooler heads make better problem solvers, so we chose to investigate and solve the problems with the site offline rather than live to the world.

The issues we ran into are unique to our environment, and they are not things that would factor into a normal customer installation.

We're happy to have the forums live and stable. As noted in my announcement Wednesday night, this is a very early beta release, so there are still known bugs yet to be fixed before the gold. As you find bugs, you may report them here as usual. As we work through the beta cycle, we will periodically update this installation to include the latest bug fixes.