Search the Community

A single setting on my test vbulletin 4 (which uses a copy of this forum's databse) screwed up all my blog attachment images. And they've probably been screwed up for about a week. I just found out and it really annoys the hell out of me because if I remember correctly, the damn setting on vb4 wouldn't let me change the directory, it only said "Click here to import your blog attachments into the new attachments structure." So I clicked it thinking nothing of it. The images loaded, except here it is a week later I finally realize that it moved the images from the directory on the live forum instead of from the directory from the test forum. Damn! POS! At least I still have copies of everything and I should be able to fix everything by putting the copies back into the right folder. I hate it when a program makes me waste time.

I haven't had the time to work on the new vb betas or release candidate versions in almost a month. Just recently though, vb has made some good progress. So we'll be upgrading the test site and I'll begin working on upgrading our themes over the next 2-3 weekends. Once enough progress has been made we'll upgrade the main forum/site probably sometime in January.

This weekend I will be upgrading our test site/copy of Ancient Clan to vBulletin 4. Once that is done, I'll work on converting ALL our styles to the current vB4 default style. Once I have all of them converted. I will upgrade Ancient Clan to vBulletin 4. The new vb is definitely looking much much better compared to 2 flippin years ago.. *sigh* if only the current version was released 2 years ago. Gah!

I made an album with some screenshots of vbulletin's default theme and the yu yu hakusho one that is now completed. The pictures in the album did not upload in the correct order, but if you can see which ones to compare: http://forums.ancientclan.com/album.php?albumid=60 Anyway, I'll be working on more styles this week/weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade our main forums the weekend after that.. assuming vBulletin actually releases their maintenance release by then. (its only about a month behind schedule. )

So I upgraded our test forum to vb 4.0.6 two days ago and its finally usable as far as I can tell. The only thing holding back the live upgrade is the themes. After I get a couple themes upgraded for use with vb 4, we'll upgrade the main forums/site. This could be this weekend, maybe next. It all depends on how long it takes me with these themes. The only theme that is currently done is the Yu Yu Hakusho theme. And of course the horribly blinding default vbulletin 4 theme. The sanji theme, maybe all blue and maybe one more theme will be done before we upgrade. yu yu hakusho theme is dark, the sanji theme is bright, (but not blinding like the vb4 theme), and all blue is medium. After the initial 3-4 themes are done, I won't work on any more themes until vb 4.1 comes out which is supposed to streamline the theme process.

Its been quite a while since I've mentioned vB 4.0 and AC's eventual upgrade to it. But low and behold, vb might actually have a usable product soon. Their new version 4.0.4 which is due out sometime next week may finally be up to a minimum standard that we can use. Once it is released, I'll be updating my test forum and trying out their new theme/style generator and looking over all the new bells and whistles and bug fixes. If it all adds up to something we can actually use, we may finally upgrade our forums... if not, then we'll probably wait again.. I'll update everyone if it looks promising.

After much consideration, we have decided to stick with vBulletin for our forum software. (AC Fest attendees found this out last weekend. ) We took advantage of the pre-sale discount a couple weeks ago. That way we could still re-sale the license if we decided to switch at a later date if we weren't impressed with what vB 4.0 looks like. Over the past week, vBulletin has a revealed it's CMS software and as of last night, the beta has become available to 4.0 license holders. Which means that we'll be installing a test board sometime this weekend and begin work on converting our themes in order of popularity as discussed in this topic: [ame=http://forums.ancientclan.com/showthread.php?t=9083]New vBulletin layout to screw over our themes, need your feedback! - Ancient Clan Forums[/ame] Admins, and mods will have access to the beta. If any other members would like to help me test things out on the test board/site, please send me a pm.

So yeah, this will be more of a rant than an actual update but its relevant because its about the core software that runs our community. [ame=http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=313353]vBulletin 4.0 Development Update - vBulletin Community Forum[/ame] vBulletin's initial plans were to release vb 4 in beta testing by the end of the second quarter of this year, which would have been the end of July. That hasn't happened. Everyone in the vb community has been wondering about the progress vb 4 has been taking and finally they have given us an update. 4-5 weeks for alpha testing. If we are lucky we'll get to upgrade AC to vb 4 beta 2 by the end of august or early september. Unfortunately, even then they may not release it in beta version to the community because they may try screwing us all by forcing us to pay for an upgrade for the first time. If vb would release more info on what their plans are and set some actual release dates or prices for their highly anticipated upgrades and add-on products they'd set alot of minds at ease. Unfortunately, they are only making people resent purchasing their product to begin with.

As per my blog entry here: http://forums.ancientclan.com/blog.php?b=222 All our current themes will have to be converted to the new layout. This may take alot of time to get all our themes switched over, so we need to know, which themes would you like too see available first? Post your top 3 or 4 themes or just the 1 or 2 that you always use, we'll see which ones are the most popular and port those over first.