First thoughts of vB 4 - Drive Thru Online - Support

Scott · #1 (**permalink**) 11-14-2009, 09:36 PM

I know we have only had the new version in our hands for just a few day's but I was wondering what your first thoughts were on the new package?

Scott

Nathan · #2 (**permalink**) 11-14-2009, 09:51 PM

I've not had a lot of time to play around with 4.0. Install was quick and easy, no suprises there. I have worked with the CMS and found it a bit difficult to work with. Nothing was very intuitive. That was yesterday, today a blog post on the vb.com site includes quite a few pdfs on working with the CMS. My intent to warm up to them with fresh pot of coffee on Sunday.

Mark · #3 (**permalink**) 11-14-2009, 10:01 PM

My initial thoughts are based on installing Garage Plus 1.2.0 and seeing what is going to be necessary to get our products working. They are:

admincp is largely the same as before
phrasing, product, permission, and plugin systems don't appear to be changed (if at all). Jury is still out on what hook changes have been made
templating has definitely changed - I'll have to completely redo all of our templates to use the new syntax
I'll have to rework our code to "register" all the variables for use in the templates
While the syntax of the templates have changed I think that the new constructs should be beneficial in the long run...especially the new looping constructs
I think the new stylevar manager interface should simplify the task of creating some nice looking styles (at least for the graphically challenged like myself)

In general I have to say that this feels a lot "greener" than I was expecting. I've spoken to a few people, including Nathan, that finds the CMS really, really green and non-intuitive at the moment.

I'm planning to get Garage Plus running on vB4 as soon possible and see if I can use the CMS to display featured garages, random garages, and stats like we're doing now with vBadvanced.

Bottom line

Any add-ons that have templates will take work to migrate to vB4 - because of the number of add-ons people are using this will delay migrations to vB4 when it is gold.
Those who produce custom styles should get to work quickly to offer some nice looking alternative styles
vB seems to be trying very hard to provide better documentation and guidance than in previous version (see my resource links below)
Its going to be a while before this is ready for a gold release and a lot of work will need to be done by the site owner to get his site completely migrated if he uses any add-ons.

Resources

I'd love to here your impressions as well.

Mark

Scott · #4 (**permalink**) 11-18-2009, 08:15 AM

I do agree with you and Nathan, much work still needs to be done to finish off the product.

I am actually amazed that the CMS is as powerful as it is and how powerful it will be when they get a chance to fine tune it's functionality. I look forward to the future on the CMS.

They are lacking some stylevars in the skinning, I'm sure we will be overloaded with them when the product goes gold.

I actually can't wait to see one of DTO's products working with 4.0

Scott

Nathan · #5 (**permalink**) 11-18-2009, 08:23 AM

I had mentioned that I was going to wrap my head around CMS this past Sunday...I also serve the latest Top Gear episodes to my site members and in my haste I broke a few of my own rules about visiting certain seedy corners of the interwebz on my production box. After spending about 10 hours trying to clean the mess I made it made more sense to start fresh. With a copy of Win 7 64 in hand that ate most of Monday. CMS has to wait...