Upcoming vB4 RC1

The vB team is happy to announce that we have updated vBulletin.com with the latest snapshot from our development trunk. The next milestone in the development of vB4 will vBulletin 4.0 RC1 and will be available for download by licensed customers on Friday, December 11.

What are the new fixes and features?

• (new) Added a forum sidebar to highlight content from blogs, cms articles and group discussions.
• Improved UTF-8 issues
• Fixed more RTL bugs
• Fixed more IE 6 compatibility issues
• about 100 more bug fixes

When is the gold release scheduled?

Our plan is to ship Gold during the week of December 21. Starting on the date of the Gold Release, vBulletin 4.0 Forums and Publishing Suite will become officially supported products. That means that it will be eligible for both ticket support (for 30 days with Forums, and for the life of the version for the Publishing Suite) and phone support (if you've purchased it).

Are there still known bugs in this release candidate?

Yes, all software releases have bugs. However, we have reached the point in the development of vB4 where it satisfies our release criteria and the remaining bugs are not serious enough to hold up release. We will, however, continue to fix known bugs in order of priority.

To put this in perspective, some of the most widely used software in the world runs in millions of production sites despite having queues of hundreds or thousands of minor bugs. For example, see the bug trackers for Java and Apache.

What will the schedule of maintenance releases be?

In parallel with working on new features for 4.1, our highest priority after the Gold release is to provide frequent updates. We will release maintenance builds immediately after the Gold release. Our first two scheduled maintenance releases are:

• 4.01 maintenance release. The Week of January 4 - 8.
• 4.02 maintenance release. The Week of January 18 - 22.


More...

Good news on them going gold this month and a nice hint to not upgrade until February

A sidebar...LMAO.

I wonder where they got the idea for the sidebar

For a while, VB4 was looking good. The side bar is the worst thing I have seen added to it so far.

Even on their site, it makes it very laggy.

What chance have the rest of us got if they cant have the forums work at a decent speed