vBulletin 4 Series Development Update

The vBulletin 4 project is progressing quickly and we are in a position to share some further information about what to expect in our next new major version release.

In August, we announced a major overhaul of the code base. Rather than targeting all of these changes in a single, long-term release, we intend to accomplish all the planned improvements over a number of versions. In order to achieve this goal, the largest vBulletin development team ever assembled is now working within an Agile development process, allowing us to deliver new features into your hands faster.

Each incremental release in the vBulletin 4 series will include improvements in features, usability and architecture. Development efforts are prioritized towards those areas that can provide real, tangible benefits to our customers, at all times with an eye toward maintaining and enhancing the performance and reliability expected of a vBulletin product.

The goal of the vBulletin 4 series is to develop a modern, scalable application platform that will allow your communities to thrive.

Key features and improvements that will be included in the first vBulletin 4 release are:

• Cross-content search system providing a single interface to search across forum posts, blog entries and comments and other supported products
• Improved search performance
• A fresh design and layout making use of semantic markup and CSS styling
• An enhanced style and template system to enhance your ability to change the layout
• Controls to assist with the placement of advertising elements
• SEO features, including friendly URLs
• A centralized attachment system, allowing the sharing of attachments across products

Alongside significant strides forward within the vBulletin forum product, we are also producing a new content management system to facilitate the creation, editing and publishing of non-forum pages. Further details about CMS features, and how it will integrate with vBulletin will be posted in due course.

We are working hard and plan to have vBulletin 4.0 released in beta form in early Q2 of 2009.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continuing support of vBulletin. We are really excited about version 4, and we're looking forward to bringing you further updates via general announcements and periodic development blog posts focusing on individual areas.


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Originally Posted by Joe Ward

[*]SEO features, including friendly URLs

Originally Posted by coolnikin

Only time will tell what they regard as friendly.

And "Friendly URLs" don't help much with SEO. We'll have to see if they take it further than that and correct any of the SEO issues with default vBulletin.

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

And "Friendly URLs" don't help much with SEO. We'll have to see if they take it further than that and correct any of the SEO issues with default vBulletin.

yah lets see ; i also hope vbseo adds some more teeth to the product

Woah! This is gonna be a badass product. Can't wait for it!

Due to the incremental (update by update) release plan for vB4.0, this will be a very basic implementation only to start. vBSEO will continue to be vBulletin compatible including the vB4.0 series when it is released in 6-12 months. You didn't expect something as powerful as vBSEO over night did you?

Rather than targeting all of these changes in a single, long-term release, we intend to accomplish all the planned improvements over a number of versions.

We are very excited to hear this news since it represents an excellent move forward in the forum world. Jelsoft has recognized the need for improved SEO, and vBSEO has it available for you in full.

Ultimately, this will help all new vBulletin users understand the importance of improved SEO and what significant role "friendly URLs" play in a forum's success. The vBSEO team will continue to provide the long tail SEO, link consensus structure that can best be described as the "vBSEO Phenomenon"!

For those of you who have been running vBSEO for more than 3 years, we urge you to avoid the temptation of saying "I told you so"! Kidding. However, you should be prepared to see forums getting vBSEO enabled at a faster rate now.

We are entering a new era, and vBSEO will now be absolutely necessary now to get that much needed edge over your competitors who were previously quietly unaware of what was needed to max out their forum's success.

Once new forum owners see that SEO features are important, they are going to want to get vBSEO-enabled, and take advantage of the #1 SEO plugin for vBulletin, and the de facto standard in SEO for vBulletin for more than 3 years.

We hope to take the opportunity to work with and advise the vBulletin team, to help guide them in the right direction. We believe that as much focus as will be put on the new "content management system", social networking features, blog, and galleries, etc; must be placed on SEO.

Our main goal is ensuring vBulletin users have the best solution available to promote their forum. Whether that means working with Jelsoft to ensure greater levels of compatibility with vBSEO's most powerful features, or having vBulletin and vBSEO merge as companies to create the most powerful community software on the Web bar none, then we are ready to help guide their transition over time. We will help ensure they do not make implementation mistakes like IPB (Invision Power Board) has with their attempt at SEO.

Originally Posted by coolnikin

yah lets see ; i also hope vbseo adds some more teeth to the product

Would you try to upgrade a great white shark? In other words, vBSEO already has some very powerful teeth! Kidding.

Actually, we started development on vBSEO 3.5 and I know customers are going to be extremely happy with the next evolution of vBSEO.

Bad news for vBSEO...

I think the real help with the new vB is going to the be table-less templates! Having vBSEO enabled now for a few years and now going to table-less, I think my pages that are not at the number 1 position should get a little boost (hopefully ).

I'm just surprised people are still saying there's no substantiating evidence that vBSEO works. If you have good content and know how to run a site, then vBSEO helps take it that extra mile...though if you don't run your site and hope VBSEO does all the work for you, then yeah, it's "not going to work".

Whatever, I'm beating the panties off of my competitors. I started my site after all of them and I'm 40k+ members ahead of them, 8k+ unique visitors daily ahead of them, etc.

/rant :P

Sounds great Justin. Glad to hear that you are doing extremely well with vBSEO. I agree that the tableless templates sound like a great improvement as well.

Actually, we started development on vBSEO 3.5 and I know customers are going to be extremely happy with the next evolution of vBSEO.

I read there would be a new admin panel as well. So, when is it out?

I think vBulletin 4 running with vBSEO 4 would be a masterpiece. In that case, 3.5 shouldn't be far, right?

We dont supply any release dates however it is not that far away

I know you don't. But your development is real slow. You/pre release team have been using 3.2.5 for quite some time but wonder why is it taking soo long to release it to all

Keep in mind, no one ever said anything about Table-less.

Semantic code still contains tables, provided the data IS in fact tabular in nature. If it logically has a header column and rows, then a table is the semantic element to use.


All that said, i'm not remotely worried about vbseo going under because of this. I have GOOD faith that vb will pretty much screw it up, and simply give url re-writes, but will not take into consideration redirects. There are many sites and re-write software out there that will take file.php?id=123 into /neatname/123/sometext/ but they will also take /neatname/123/someothertext/ as well. Google and many bots DO inject random things into strings like this. it's a huge duplicate content issue. vbseo addresses this. I doubt vb will have the insight to do so.

At the end of the day, I look at it like a car.

most cars come with suspension.... but people who 'drive' know that an aftermarket coilover suspension will blow away the OEM shocks/struts. Both support the car, but the coilovers will let you nose dive on the inside of the competition running the oem setup.
In fact, my whole big board community is built around this concept...


As long as vbseo is making scripts, i will be a customer. Leaving vbseo to the oem vb system only will most likely be counter productive, especially if you already have a license.


All said and done, i'm just glad to see a beta schedule of less than 6 months away. That's really encouraging. I was expecting 2010.