Adrian Schneider – Dev

Clients have been asking me since its early beta stages what my thoughts are about vBulletin 4. Usually I joke and spew out the usual garbage about how horrible it is. I’m not saying it isn’t, but I think it’s time I give it a fair review.

Background

Before I go into much detail, let me begin by explaining my experience and background with vBulletin. My first use with vBulletin was back in 2004 on a gaming site. Since 2005, I have been developing on it as an application platform, and for a while, was doing it full time (2 years or so). I am confident that I am one of the most experience vBulletin modders around. I love vBulletin, though over the years I became annoyed with working with it due to the outdated codebase. In the past two years or so, I have shifted most of my custom develoment to Zend Framework, which is of course at a much higher standard.

With the illusion of vBulletin 4 in my mind, I was very excited to begin looking at it.

Internet Brands Acquisition

During the very early stages of vBulletin 4, vBulletin and its company, Jelsoft, were aquired by their biggest customer: Internet Brands. There are two very opposed reactions about this. The good: since their business relies on vBulletin, they will take good care of it. However, there is also the other way of looking at it: because their biggest competitors are also their customers, they have power to kill their competition and steer the product to their advantage.

Shortly after this took place, there were a lot of skeptics out there, but I didn’t think too much of it. I’m an optimist, and thought it was about time vBulletin was picked up by a bigger company. They needed the extra funding and development power.

After some time had passed, several of the core staff members began dropping like flies. More rumors started pouring out about the takeover. One of the reasons for this was IB is a US based company, and Jelsoft was a UK based company. It makes sense, but it wasn’t the reason many of the developers left. They were not happy with how the product was being managed. Their core values were changing.

Back to the Future – First Impressions

When vBulletin 4 first hit vBulletin.com, it looked pretty bad. However, I had some of that golden optimism reserved, because I know that it’s CSS based, and will take some time to get it right. I don’t care too much how the stock software looks, because I (like many others) will be customizing it to death. It took a lot of nagging, but we got some of the key things cleaned up. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I don’t see it changing much more at this point.

Product Management

This may not be an entirely relevant point, but it needs to be said. Management has seriously dropped the ball – no, they kicked it over the fence. They are so focused on making release deadlines set by upper management (surely to impress investors) that the product quality has gone to shit. There are serious bugs in the “gold” (4.0) release that should have been fixed in a beta. It’s ridiculous. The whole 4.x release is a joke, because it’s not even a proper release. It’s a (poor) transition of the 3.5-3.8 line. It should have been called 3.9.

In the forum itself, the only big thing worth mentioning is the new CSS layout. The addition of the CMS is nice too, even though it’s a paid product. However, it is nowhere near production ready. I strongly recommend not to use it or vBuletin 4.x until things drastically change. If I have an ounce of hope left for vBulletin Solutions / IB, then it will be held within 5.0.

Anyway, let’s get into some specifics.

New Template System

The new style management system is horrible to use. I admit, it’s a step in the right direction, and I applaud forward movement. However, it was done very poorly. I’m glad there is a new template engine in place (though I prefer raw PHP), and I’m VERY glad that there is support for loops. It will take some time, but I hope by 5.0 they will have everything converted to use loops in templates instead of hundreds of bit templates. That’s what makes skinning so hard.

Skinning on 4.0 is more or less as painful as it was on 3.5-3.8.

New Default Design

I am liking the new design more and more, but I still don’t think it’s up to the latest standards of what is out there right now. I’m not talking about web standards, but just quality standards. It looks good, but it’s not great. With the addition of more UI people / designers, I expected a lot more.

New Codebase

The new code is pretty good. I think it’s a bit unnecessarily over-complicated though. There are ways to create a very brilliant application design without making it seem complicated. Simple code is readable code and it takes a lot more planning. I’m not going to complain though, because it’s about what I expected. They did good.

However (and this is a big one), the new codebase is barely used. It’s only used by the CMS, because vBulletin itself is still in transition. Really then, you are not getting much of anything new in 4.0 unless you get the suite.

I haven’t seen a single developer utilize the new codebase yet. Every single person I’ve talked to has only converted the templates to the new syntax. They really should have used something more simple for the template variable assignments. Like I said: simple code is well planned code. This does not appear to be well planned.

Another Look

You’ll notice a lot of the complaints I have are because vBulletin is in a transition stage. If they were to push this honestly as a transition release, and perhaps called it 3.9 and didn’t push so hard for pre sales, then this wouldn’t be all that bad. It’s a step in the right direction. It’s a shame that management had to butcher their great reputation and basically lie to all the customers.

Bottom Line

Alright, so in all fairness, it’s not a horrible release. However, there isn’t much new to justify upgrading in my opinion. It’s also not nearly as stable and deserving of a gold title as the previous branch. My advice? don’t waste your money on it. Wait for 5.x. Hopefully they can salvage what little reputation they have left before IPB steals any more customers.