Just wanted to give a quick update on the CMS features of the vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite. We just launched the CMS on our site. Check it out at:http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/content.php

You are going to see a sample site with multiple sections, categories and content created with our CMS. We are still trying out different layout and content. It would be great to hear suggestions from the community about what type of content they would like to see here. In fact, we may elect “editors” from the community to publish new articles.

For today, most of the content on the site is “lorem ipsum” articles with some of random photos. But on the homepage, I created 3 sample tutorial articles that I think will be helpful:

1. A visual guide of the various elements on the page.


2. An article that visually explains the steps to create an article. This gives you a better sense of features available when publishing content.


3. Description of the new “Promote to Article” feature.


I will continue to publish more documentation of the CMS features here.

To demonstrate some of the layout and customization features, on each section you will see different page layouts, content layouts, and various built-in widgets and also 3rd party widgets (i.e. Google Gadgets). Of course, all of this is totally configurable by the admin.

To promote more content discovery across the entire site, you will see on the homepage right sidebar, three widgets:
- Recent Forum Posts Widgets
- Recent Blog Entries Widget
- New Article Comments

This is still beta and you will continually see the CMS UI designs, UX, and features evolve until we launch. In fact, the screenshots on vbulletin.com site is already old and need to be replaced. Some examples of recent changes as of this morning:
- The Section Navigation Widgets and Category Navigation look incredibly better.
- The Category Widget now displays the number of content in that category.
- We were now able to display the video player with the Article Preview on Section Pages.
- Updated and created new icons.
- The Recent Comments widgets now display avatars.

With all that said, take a look and we welcome suggestions and feedback.

Cheers,

Don