vBulletin has always been a very revered product and one of the most commonly used forum software over the years. In the past 1-2 years different vbulletin sub versions in the 3.x series have given us lots of features to play with and also led to the official addons, such as Blog , Project Tools which maybe not as popular as its predecessor , but definitely picked up user interest. With the last few versions, vBulletin also has come up with the idea of introducing a community script and not just a forum software only( not my favourite though ) and also profile customizations.

But recently vbulletin website and forum also seems top be proceeding towards vBulletin 4 , their next major version. Some of the key improvements which they have announced as of yet includes :

• Cross content search system , facilitating centralized search for forum posts, blog entries and comments and any other supported products
• Better style templates and systems to make more semantic coding and adherence to CSS from the base templating system
• A better look and feel for the base product also using semantic markup
• SEO urls and search engine friendly options
• Options to include advertisements inherently in the script itself
• and a centralized attachment system

Features like these make you clearly feel that they have understood one of the points I had pointed out earlier – that it is time to stablize the main product and spend more time on improvements for the forum administrator. While additional features do sell the products, it is improvements like these that make the customer / forum administrator happy. From the official mini site for this release, I quote

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.

Although they have not yet given any pricing indication, but surely that can come . What they have definitely mentioned that the code is being rewritten. There is still no alpha or beta and no exact time given for us to view it.

OK , so I have not only decided to get back to blogging again , but this time I hope to keep doing it more regularly. You have heard that before , eh ? I agree but what can we do … as your work grows almost all the day goes into serving clients … and hardly you would get much time to sit down and pen your thoughts. Heck, I bought a 32″ plasma and I don’t even get to watch that

Coming to the topic title – Upgrading Wordpress 2.8.2 , i am happy to say that this blog is now running the current Wordpress release . This sub version does not include much but a XSS fix , but the Wordpress 2.8.1 was from what i remember a more detailed upgrade.

• The dashboard loading time was awful earlier which now seems much better.
• The automatic upgrade no longer accidentally deletes files when cleaning up from a failed upgrade.
• Extra security has been put in place to better protect you from plugins that do not do explicit permission checks.
• Disabled code highlighting due to browser incompatibilities.
• Switched back to curl as the default transport.

Although the auto upgrade feature is not new in these versions of Wordpress , but can’t get myself to write a Upgrade post without mentioning it. This single option has cut down some of our clients who often asked us to do a version upgrade for them as a charge. Now it is simply a breeze – whenever you see a message on your dashboard, all the next work is browser based – if you know your FTP password. Even the plugin upgrades hardly requires breaking a sweat.