Hello Mark, this is Scott who asked you some questions today at vBulletin.org.

What are your plans for vBulletin 4.0? Are you developing or the 4.0 release? If I purchase now, will I have to pay for the upgrade?

Scott

Howdy Scott,

Thanks for registereing.

As to vB 4.0, once the gold version has been released we will start the devolpment process to support the 4.x line. Until we have the production version any work we do now could be in vain as many changes could be made. I think you find the community of vB developers are all in the same boat here.

A purchase now will entitle you to all updates for one year. There will be no separate charge for a vB 4.x migration. Once purchased as long as the annual renewal is kept up to date all updates will be included.

Thanks,

__________________
-----
Nathan Freedenberg
Director - Product Support
Drive Thru Online

Very good, thank you!

Hey guys,

with vb4 being gold now, do you have any sort of timetable for a compatible release of this product? Not in a big rush, just wanting to get some sort of idea of when I might be upgrading my forum.

I've been investigating what it will take to get to 4.0 for all of our products. There are three areas that we have to address:

1) Change in the way that we call templates from code. I figured out what I believe is a way for us to support both vB 3.8.X and 4.0.X from the same codebase.

2) Change in the way that information is displayed through templates. This is pretty straightforward although it requires going through every template. Since the syntax is incompatible with vB 3.8.X we will have to deliver two sets of templates with each product (one for 3.8.X installations and another for 4.0.X installations). Regardless we have a method for dealing with this.

3) Change in template display layouts. All the style elements (ie - tborder, alt1, alt2, etc.) appear to be gone in vB 4. As to what to change these two, how to redesign the layout to use these, etc. is up in the air. I'm not a CSS expert (yet) so it will take some time to get this piece figured out.

With the above in mind I feel like we're 2/3 of the way toward figuring out what it will take to get our products to vB4. I'll be working more on this last point this week to get this remaining item figured out. From there I'll be able to estimate in what order our products will be supported. My gut tells me in will be in the following order:

ShowCase
Vendor Tools
Garage
Clubs
all our other products

Mark

__________________
Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Helping Turn Your Passion into Profit

This is very good news, thanks for the updates.

Scott

Just keep in mind that the last item I have to clear above is a big one. I'm not a CSS wizard so I'm going to have to do quite a lot of research to get this figured out. I think its going to take some time to go through all templates and get a reasonable display working.

Mark

__________________
Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Helping Turn Your Passion into Profit

Well, judging by the shape that vbulletin is in, I am definitely not in a hurry to update the site I have Showcase running on. Wishing I would have kept all of my forums at 3.8 right now....

Let me know if you need some help Mark.

Have you done any template work with 4.0 yet? I've been working with them and have many of our templates "working" but given that all of the tborder, alt1, alt2, etc. styles are gone its difficult to figure out what default style elements we can use without having to roll our own.

__________________
Mark Ferguson
President - Drive Thru Online, Inc.
Drive Thru Online – Helping Turn Your Passion into Profit