New version status update

[Greebo]

Jelsoft, the makers of vBulletin, have announced the Release Candidate of vBulletin 3.5. A Release Candidate means it is intended as the FINAL beta, and the officially supported release should not be far behind.

vBAdvanced, makers of our Links Database, home page, and the soon to be revealed new and improved photo gallery, have also announced 3.5 compatible versions of their product.

This means that, over the next two to three weeks (hopefully) as vB 3.5 is officially launched, we'll be resuming beta testing for our own upgrade.

We have a group of beta testers, but we are always looking for more. Anyone interested in becoming a PoA Test Pilot should send me a PM. Our beta testers are called upon to test new features before they go live, to find problems and provide feedback. When we start on our final tests of vBulletin 3.5, our beta testers will be asked to do a complete review of every feature they can find, to look for any possible problems that we might have missed. Beta testing is a thankless task, not for the technologically timid - but very good for the technologically inexperienced user who is willing to try new things without knowing what they're doing! All we require of our beta testers is the ability to remember what you did when something broke and explain it to us so we can reproduce it.

Thanks again for landing at Pilots of America!

Chuck Haeberle
PoA Management

 

[Greebo]

Well its taken longer than I wished, but Jelsoft finally announced the official release of vBulletin 3.5.0.

In the next week or so, as time allows, I will be rebuilding the test site with the new version. Anyone interested in helping out with beta testing the new version should PM me (if you're not already a member of the Test Pilot team).

CH

 

[mmilano]

is there really a lot of customization or 'vbhacks' installed in this forum besides just modifying the styles slightly?

you pay a premium price for vbulletin because these guys develop the software and do a lot of quality assurance before they release it. my point is that they already do a lot of beta testing.

i've run vbulletin on a couple communities for quite a few years now and i can confidently say that an update should not break any standard functions. ( unless you have modified any php code manually )

the only precaution i usually take is to make sure i backup the files and database before installing the upgrade.

if you ever have any questions about vbulletin customizing, adding features, or anything related to php/mysql for this site, don't hesitate to drop me a line. i work with PHP professionally for a large company.

 

[Greebo]

Yes, we have quite a few customizations on this site and add more from time to time. Thus the need to beta test.

I've been doing development of some kind or another for 22 years now and 15 of them professionally. I trust vBulletin's development team tremendously. I also still beta test. Been burned too many times not to.

Thanks for the feedback.