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Vbulletin 3.7 Beta 2 Release
Last Monday, Vbulletin released vbulletin 3.7 as a public beta. Beta 2 includes several bug fixes that were found by users in the first beta version which ran live on their site. This new version of vbulletin is the first version to contain major feature improvements in a few years. Among these new features are user galleries, improved user profiles, thread prefixes, and more.
I’m sure what everyone wants to know is when the gold release will be? Impossible to say as it all depends on bugs and security issues found. However, looking at the past we can make an educated guess. Vbulletin 3.6 beta went gold approximately 2 months after it’s release. We can probably see the first release candidate in around a month.
3.5 beta (Jun 9th) - 3.5 RC1 (Jul 26th) - 3.5 Gold (Sept 28th)
3.6 beta (Jun 8th) - 3.6 RC1 (Jul 7th) - 3.6 Gold (Aug 3rd)
Above are the approximate release dates of the Release Candidates, Gold releases, and Beta versions.
While some people have been bold enough to upgrade their live forum to vbulletin 3.7, it’s recommended that you upgrade only a test forum. I set up my test forum, and though I was tempted to run it live, I decided to wait for at least the first Release Candidate. The admin control panel has sections for the new features; it’d be as one expected. Gallery and Social Bookmarking options listed under vbulletin options, with the thread prefixes and navbar notices having their own section. If you choose to upgrade you should be knowlegeable in how to do so and be able to do frequent upgrades as bug fixes and security updates are found.
Vbulletin 3.7 First Look
Two days ago, vbulletin showed us a preview of the upcoming 3.7 release. This release focuses on social networking, and we see many new features. The new version will be implemented on vbulletin.com on Monday. Following that it will enter a beta release. The timeframe of the beta release depends on any bugs or issues found. My personal guess is that it will enter beta testing later next week and will be fully released late the following week.
I’m not going to cover all of the features here, but I do wish to highlight some I think will be particularly interesting to use.
The new version includes tagging, in which users can add tags to posts and threads. These tags will describe the thread - when a particular tag is selected, it will display all posts with that tag. This gives us the typical “tag cloud.”
Furthermore, users can now add pictures to picture galleries. While these albums are a great additional feature, it’s still limited. It’s not meant to be a global gallery, as users can’t add photos to group albums. I predict this will be a feature in vbulletin 4.0 or with an additional addon modification.
The most significant changes are those of the user profile. There is now a reciprocal friendship feature and commenting on user profiles. The user profile has had a major rewrite, and now has a more “myspace” look. Administrators can define additional fields that can be displayed on the right column. The user profiles are also customizable by the user - they can design it how they like. Unfortunately, this version does not allow users to drag-and-drop profile boxes or add custom ones themselves.
Another highly notable addition is the social group feature. Now users can create their own groups based on certain interests. These groups can have a group photo gallery, and also has a commenting system similar to the “facebook wall.” While this commenting system is fantastic, it still leaves a lot to be desired. It’s not a full forum for that group, though I suppose administrators could add forums for groups manually on an as-needed basis.
In addition to these features, there are additional spam prevention tools, thread prefixes, post edit history, attachment viewing lightbox, profile visitor tracking, automatic resizing of attached images, custom icons for each forum, advertisement locations definable with templates, YUI instead of AJAX, and many more features.
I’m very pleased with this release and look forward to implementing it. This release has giving vbulletin users a lot of what they asked for, even though many of those were already existing modifications. Now they have official support.
Vbulletin 3.7 Social Networking Predictions
As many of you know, Vbulletin is working on their latest major release of their product, version 3.7. This project has been in the works for a while, and this version is supposed to focus heavily on social networking.
Everything that follows in this post is purely theoretical speculation. Some of these things are based on facts, others are just what I think is practical. If I say something stated as fact after this point, it isn’t - it’s just my thoughts. Please keep that in mind. :p
Release Date
Kier, from vbulletin.com, recently said that All will be reveled very soon. How soon? Well, a user took his guess.
“My guess is this year is the beta/rc year. Stable will be out next year I would imagine.”
width=”450px” The vbulletin response? Well, surprisingly enough, there was one this time. Kier responded by saying it will be out “sooner than that.” So, in effect, we can expect the stable version of 3.7 to be out before January 1st, 2007.
Regarding the vbulletin blog addon, a license holder asked when the next version of the blog would be, then soon stated that 3.7 must be in it’s “final stages.”
Freddie Bingham’s reply was that it was.
While the final reply doesn’t help us in guessing a date, it does reinforce the fact that it’s nearly finished.
I think a reasonable estimates would be as follows:
11/18-24/2007 - Vbulletin begins running 3.7 on it’s own site
11/26-30/2007 - Vbulletin release private beta version (if it has not already)
11/9-13/2007 - Vbulletin releases a stable version of 3.7 to public buyers.
Again, these are only estimates. However, at this point I feel confident that each release will be within one week (plus or minus) the estimate I gave.
Features
When the vbulletin blog first came out, I bought it right away. I was slightly disappointed - it didn’t have many features that standard blogs have (such as tags, customizable look change, customizable blocks, etc). However, many of the things the first version of the blog was missing are promised in the next major version, which should soon follow the release of 3.7.
My fear at the moment is that vbulletin will rush their release and give us a watered-down version of 3.7 like they did with the blog.
A screenshot was (accidentally?) published several months ago. I feel confident they’ve passed this stage, but I hope it’s a lot better than what we’ve seen so far:
Based on this screenshot we can determine we should have a “about user block” which contains contact information, etc, as well “about me” section and sections for easy access to the blog and forum posts. We can also see the beginnings of a comment box that can be used for users to leave comments for each other (like with myspace).
Additional probably features I think are practical to be released are as follows:
- Potential invite friends capabilities
- “Top Friends” or “Most Recent Friends” list
- Potential song or video clip area (though this might be stretching it)
- Better displaying of custom profile fields (i.e., interests, religion, political views, etc)
- Mood feature
- Basic image gallery features. I anticipate users being able to upload about five different pictures - NOT like an image gallery.
Again, most of these are only guesses. I left out several features I would like to see simply because I don’t think we’ll see them until vbulletin 4.0.