Hey vBulletin Users!

noppid

Jun 9th 2005, 4:34 pm

vBulletin 3.5 beta 1 has been released. It's clear most all of the hacks and mods we may use have to be recoded.

How will that affect you? Do you have a plan?

How many hacks do you have? Are they your's or are you gonna be waiting for hack upgrades before you can upgrade?

Is anyone here running the unstable vBulletin beta 1 on their live forum? :eek:

We expect to be dealing with the issues ourselves for our sites. I'm gonna preview the code tonight. How about you?

digitalpoint

Jun 9th 2005, 4:42 pm

I have a snapshot (from a few hours ago) of this forum database running it.

It's REALLY, REALLY different in the guts, and people will need to forget how they did things before (a lot more OO class usage for example), because it's totally different.

That being said, the plug-in system is freaking bad ASS, and will be well worth the recoding necessary.

I already reported one bug with the plug-in system (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/bugs35.php?do=view&bugid=193) that I found, and requested the addition of another hook (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=884946#post884946).

noppid

Jun 9th 2005, 4:47 pm

Thanks for the reply, I'm expecting alot of reading to "get it".

My hacks don't need alot of areas to hook into, so I expect my task to be challenging, but not over whelming.

Aside from the code, all the necessary template changes alone present quite a bit of work.

The folks with the SEO hack and the arcade will be busy. They have some work to do I bet!

Dastar

Jun 9th 2005, 5:02 pm

I've been holding off on upgrading from phpbb2 to vbulletin because of waiting for 3.5. Though I unsure if I should just wait for the final release or just wait it out. I also was getting a redesign for the site, but that will wait awhile too because of the template changes. There are also quite a few hacks I want to implement, but because of the fact many of them are going to have to be rewritten, I suppose it'll be awhile (but well worth it because of the plug in system).

noppid

Jun 9th 2005, 5:06 pm

Yeah, the impex product for vbulletin 3.5 will not be released till the vbulletin 3.5 production code is.

Waiting is your best bet now I'd say too.

The Sandman

Jun 9th 2005, 5:09 pm

Any guess as to just how long the wait will be before vB 3.5 Final is released?

Infiniterb

Jun 9th 2005, 5:11 pm

I'm expecting a while for current hacks to be changed over so I'm going to wait before I do any upgrades.

noppid

Jun 9th 2005, 5:12 pm

That's anybodies guess. I'd say watching the bug tracker may render clues.

For hackers, the longer the better. Maybe we can see most converted before the vBulletin 3.5 production release.

Dastar

Jun 9th 2005, 5:36 pm

Yeah, the impex product for vbulletin 3.5 will not be released till the vbulletin 3.5 production code is.

Waiting is your best bet now I'd say too.

Interesting, that's a helpful tip about Impex (but makes since).

For anyone who doesn't know, you use Impex to convert an existing forum database to VBulletin (such as converting another forum database too VB).

digitalpoint

Jun 9th 2005, 5:43 pm

There are only 3 places I touch the source PHP files, and I've already rewrote 2 of them to use the plug-in system, so once they fix my reported bug, I'll switch production over to 3.5.

The AJAX stuff is awesome, and the template history system is REALLY awesome too. Lets you pull up your templates and compare them side by side with the default, highlighting the changes between the two. Makes it not too terrible for template updates now.

noppid

Jun 9th 2005, 5:45 pm

hehe, I'm not even opening the zip till the kids are in bed.

Even if I get my code working, I'm skered of the upgrade to vBulletin 3.5 Beta 1. :eek:

I'll follow your lead, if it survives DP, I'll be safe in my little town. :)

noppid

Jun 9th 2005, 9:22 pm

No admin hooks! :eek:

Queries to fecth hooks! :eek:

I dunno, but I'm in up to my eyeballs now!

ZuraX

Jun 9th 2005, 11:28 pm

I added so many hacks to my forum I am scared to upgrade ever! lol

ZuraX

Jun 9th 2005, 11:30 pm

One thing I see they didnt change was the way the forum URLs show as. Was hoping they would SEO them. :(

noppid

Jun 10th 2005, 1:27 pm

One thing I see they didnt change was the way the forum URLs show as. Was hoping they would SEO them. :(

They did some SEO stuff in the vBulletin 3.5 titles, the descriptions, and the keyword tags. They did some stuff in the archive too.

However, none of it is impressing me at this time. They seem to be following the lead of one particular poster at vbulletin.com and I disagree with the ideas in alot of ways. But hey, that's the beauty of templates, you can change um!

I like the plug in system. I think it's a bit much over head though for a largely hacked board. That remains to be seen though.

I like the plug in system, but they forgot the ACP side. :( Not very helpful ATM, you still have to hack there for some stuff. Adding new menu choices is real easy though.

I like the new group permissions xml plug in system. That is awsome, but I wish they would have found a way to do that without having to hack a new field into the usergroup table.

The new DB class should really benefit huge forums, but that's a common sense call from reading the code. I have no way of comparing it myself.

The new input variable processing method seems much more complete then the old globalize function.

That's all I got for now, what do you see?

ZuraX

Jun 10th 2005, 1:42 pm

I have yet to look at the code. Just see they got it running at vbulletin.com and the URLs are the same as the 3.0.7 and under ones.

onestop

Jun 10th 2005, 2:00 pm

I'm waiting for the stable version of 3.5 to switch my forum. I hope it won't take long.

ZuraX

Jun 10th 2005, 2:05 pm

I am hoping a stable version is out before I have to renew my linc. incase I decide not to renew it right away.

noppid

Jun 10th 2005, 2:36 pm

I'm pretty certain I'll need at least one new license by then. I expect an august release to be stable. But of course, that's a guess.

digitalpoint

Jun 10th 2005, 3:35 pm

I like it... from a coder/administration standpoint I think it's all pretty awesome. A little annoying I have to recode all my custom stuff in this forum, but I'm working on it, and going forward it will be worth it.

noppid

Jun 10th 2005, 3:37 pm

Not doubt, I couldn't agree more. My porting is going very well.

I have my installer done for vBGarage and the new group permissions integrated.

I have to go through the main file now and the templates. My little add in enhancements will be a breeze.

ZuraX

Jun 10th 2005, 3:52 pm

Got a question for you all. I plan to not reinstall a few hacks. When I do upgrade will the changes made by some of the hacks to mysql ruin the upgrade?

digitalpoint

Jun 10th 2005, 8:11 pm

I'm live with 3.5 now... weeeeee... :)

SportsOutlaw

Jun 10th 2005, 8:11 pm

Looks like DP has successfully gotten beta 1 up and running.

noppid

Jun 10th 2005, 9:16 pm

I'm live with 3.5 now... weeeeee... :)

This is probably the only time I'll get away with saying, If you can do it, so can I. :p

But I'm still scared. Got more code to port for these darn hacks.

digitalpoint

Jun 10th 2005, 9:44 pm

But I'm still scared. Got more code to port for these darn hacks.Yeah, I powered through my stuff... turned all the customizations here into 17 plug-ins, and was able to empty most of the phpinclude_start template as well. So I'm pretty happy with it. It's a really nice feeling once you get everything ported to the plug-in architecture.

I was able to eliminate touching all source PHP files except for 2, and both of those it's just one line of code being added.

I put in 2 requests for new hooks (where I have to hit my 2 files), and I think I might get one of them. Probably 50/50 on the other. Would be REALLY nice to not hit any .php files. :)

digitalpoint

Jun 10th 2005, 9:52 pm

Oh... BTW, here's something nifty I just found with 5,000+ emails in my mailbox... :)

Make sure your database user you use for the forum has access to the LOCK TABLES privilege. I run everything with minimum permissions (for security) and apparently it's new in 3.5. Not a fatal error (I would have noticed if it was), but it looks like it tries to lock the mail queue DB (a good idea) when it's sending email. Anyway... maybe that will save someone else 5,000 emails. ;)

nevetS

Jun 11th 2005, 1:31 am

The forum is noticably faster now. I think AJAX is giving javascript a whole new life.

l234244

Jun 11th 2005, 2:48 am

I'm a new to vbulletin, how long do they normally wait to promote the beta unstable version to stable?

digitalpoint

Jun 11th 2005, 8:46 am

No specific timeframe, just when it's ready.

noppid

Jun 11th 2005, 9:10 am

Got a question for you all. I plan to not reinstall a few hacks. When I do upgrade will the changes made by some of the hacks to mysql ruin the upgrade?

Only if they created database fields or tables that are a conflict.

The best thing to do would be to check with the specific authors.

noppid

Jun 11th 2005, 9:17 am

Yeah, I powered through my stuff...

I'm still doing vBGarage. I figure that should teach me every aspect of the changes when done. I'm real close.

Then I got vBIndex to check into and the Shoutbox hacks. Both pretty darn big addins. I have no clue if the authors are gonna do um.

P.S. $gagage is a very very very hard typo to catch for garage, even with it misspelled in 8 places from cut and paste! :/

digitalpoint

Jun 11th 2005, 9:24 am

noppid

Jun 11th 2005, 5:29 pm

One nice thing I finally realized towards the end of porting everything to plug-ins is that the exit; function works (it doesn't in phpstart_include) so makes debugging handy. I did a lot of this type of thing with my plug-ins to figure out what objects/variables were available:

print_r (get_defined_vars());
exit;

Thanks for the tip. I used alot of echos with exits to debug. As of now, except for letting someone else try, vBGarage is ported and working as a new install.

I have to write the upgrade proceedure.

Was a good upgrade, I learned alot.

digitalpoint

Jun 12th 2005, 2:00 pm

I just dug into the new ability to send the datastore table to shared memory. Damn is it cool! :)

Especially nice if your web server is separate from your database server. Can send it to a file or shared memory on the web server for fast access. For shared memory, one of the options they support is to utilize Turck MMCache. But I don't use Turck because it's outdated (I use eAccelerator). Anyway... long story short, is I simply added an eAccelerator sub-class to the datastore class, and viola! works like magic. :)

I hope vBulletin adds an eAccelerator sub-class to the distribution so I don't have to add it each time.

Either way... the local datastore stuff is awesome. Now they just need to do that with the template database. ;)

noppid

Jun 12th 2005, 2:43 pm

That is very nice. Large installations will appreciate it.

I may have to use it if all 10 of my users logon at once, but for now, I'm ok. :)

digitalpoint

Jun 12th 2005, 2:48 pm

Another cool thing about the shared memory stuff is now I can actually see how easy it is with eAccelerator... so I'm probably going to do something similar for the ad network ad server. :)

noppid

Jun 12th 2005, 2:59 pm

Another cool thing about the shared memory stuff is now I can actually see how easy it is with eAccelerator... so I'm probably going to do something similar for the ad network ad server. :)

Now that's cool news. Though having very small installations currently, I would think at first those things would be of no real benefit to me, however a little can mean alot sometimes.

Is this dedicated server stuff only? I know the mmcache stuff is from when I had an actual server last year, but now I'm on shared hosting. I ask because I am considering sharing a dedicated which of course I'll get to tweak or perhaps my own Virtual Private Server.

Thanks for the replies, you find interesing things.

letsmakeamillion

Jun 12th 2005, 3:15 pm

No offense or anything, but I think the new method of getting quick reply to work really sucks and is non-intuitive (especially for brand new visitors to the forum and those non-techie types). Why not just keep it the way it was before.. (if it aint broke, don't fix it)

People will have to guess what the hell a quick reply button is.

Very confusing and low usability factor IMO.

digitalpoint

Jun 12th 2005, 3:29 pm

Now that's cool news. Though having very small installations currently, I would think at first those things would be of no real benefit to me, however a little can mean alot sometimes.

Is this dedicated server stuff only? I know the mmcache stuff is from when I had an actual server last year, but now I'm on shared hosting. I ask because I am considering sharing a dedicated which of course I'll get to tweak or perhaps my own Virtual Private Server.

Thanks for the replies, you find interesing things.Doesn't have to be dedicated to use it, although I own my own servers, so mine are.

No offense or anything, but I think the new method of getting quick reply to work really sucks and is non-intuitive (especially for brand new visitors to the forum and those non-techie types). Why not just keep it the way it was before.. (if it aint broke, don't fix it)

People will have to guess what the hell a quick reply button is.

Very confusing and low usability factor IMO.Read this.