What's New

The best method for upgrading your community is to be informed and prepared before hand. Today, I hope to give you some hints and tips that will ease the transition for you, your staff and the users of your community. Upgrading to a new major version of a software package can be time consuming and shouldn't be handled while under a time-crunch or hastily. The first thing you want to do is plan for the upgrade and make sure your community is aware of potential downtime when the upgrade is performed. Hopefully these steps will help you do this.

Preparing For Your Upgrade
Plugins and Addons
If you have plugins or products installed in your community, you will want to make sure you have a copy of the current version on hand. Keeping a copy allows you to maintain critical installation and uninstallation information. You most likely won't want to use these addons but the documentation will come in handy.
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Welcome to the new CMS. Here's a quick guide of the different areas of this page.

1. Section Navigation Widget. This widget allows you to go to different sections. The "plus icon" means that this section has sub-sections. Clicking on the "plus icon" will display the sub-sections.
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We have created 2 new PDF documents that empower customers and our developer community to make advanced customizations to their vBulletin 4.0 powered site.

1). Forum Templates Visual Dictionary
2). CMS Templates Visual Dictionary

These Templates Visual Dictionary documents will help you "visually" identify templates used on each page or module. By understanding a template structure for a given page/module , you will be able to control the layout and design of every item on the page. If you want to radically change the UI to fit your theme and style or you decide to display only certain data on a page , this is completely possible with the vB4 template system.
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To help accelerate learning and mastering the CMS features in the vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite (beta 3) product, we put together an updated set of "Getting Started with CMS" documentations.

There are 5 PDF documents and I think this might be the right order to read them:
1. CMS_Sections.pdf (spilt into 2 pdf files)
2. CMS_Permissions.pdf
3. CMS_Articles.pdf (spilt into 2 pdf files)
4. CMS_Widgets.pdf
5. CMS_Grids_&_Layouts

And if you missed my past blog post on "Skinning your vB4 Forum in 10 Easy Steps", you can go here and download the PDF and example style:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/entry...-10-Easy-Steps
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Here's a quick visual guide on how to create a new article with the CMS.

1. Create New Article Button: Navigate to the section you want the article to be published in. Click on the “Create a New Article” button. This will open an article form.


2. Article Title: In the "Add/Edit Article" screen, enter the title of your article in the “Title” textbox.
3. SEO URL: Put in SEO-friendly URL in "SEO ...

Here's a quick Visual Guide on how Manage Sections in the new CMS.

1. Editing a Section: If you have permissions to manage a Section, as you hover over the Section title, a pencil icon will display.
. By default, if this is blank, the system will automatically copy the section title.
4. Section Layout: For each section you can define an individual section layout.
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I wanted to provide everyone with 3 updated PDF documents:

• Forum StyleVar Visual Dictionary 2.0
• CMS StyleVar Visual Dictionary
• Blog StyleVar Visual Dictionary

The StyleVar (style variable) Dictionary is a complete visual reference guide aimed at understanding how and where to use each StyleVar for advanced skinning/theme customization.

Based on overwhelming customer feedback and suggestions, we have added quite a lot more StyleVars to Forums.
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One of the innovative new features on vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite is the cross-publishing "Promote to Article" functionality.

In the spirit of promoting content discovery, we wanted to create features that will allow content to flow between Forums, Blogs, and Articles. For example, there might be a really popular post in the forums, but unfortunately it is buried inside page 13 of a thread. We ...