vBulletin 3 Public Preview Site

[John]

After many man-hours of coffee-filled late-night coding, we are very proud to announce that vBulletin 3 is ready for public viewing! It has been a long time in coming but it is finally here!

The beta copy of vB3 is now running on this site and the URL below is now closed.

Before I waffle too much more, here is the URL:

http://beta.vbulletin.com/vb3/

(congrats to xiphoid for spotting this first!)

There are a few things to note about the forum:

• The style is NOT finished yet. We have decided to stick with the vB2 colours until the new one is ready.
• There are bugs left! (ok, this goes without saying!) We have been working very hard getting all the features coded in, and we have pretty much finished this now. The new private message system will be completed in a few day's time. So what we need now is your feedback and comments and suggestions. We will not be adding major new features in from now on, but smaller suggestions may well be taken. Also, please be sure to let us know about any bugs you find.
• Source code: is not available to the public yet.

There are two "thank you"s that I would like to make:
1) The developers: for generally being very smart and very cool.
2) You guys: for bearing with us for so long.

So go tell your friends, your granny, your dog, and anyone else you can find! Then once you've done that, go and play with vB3!

Enjoy,

John

[John]

Comprehensive Features List

Scott Molinari has very kindly compiled a full features list from our completed todo list. This is by no means exhaustive, and should not be regarded as perfectly accurate: not everything was recorded in the todo and some things were changed too.

Added Features:

--to the user interface

General

• Quick registration system...username, password, email and any required custom fields and timezone
• Pop-up auto-refreshing buddylist with ICQ-style alerts when new buddies come online. You'll find a link in the temp buttons top right in the nav bar.
• Show the title of the last posted to thread for each forum on index.php
• Subscription to Threads/Forum without receiving e-mails
• Favorite threads - you don't get email from these either.
• User rating - Karma
• User ranking
• Password break-in watches -- too many failed attempts warning with a preset wait after too many failures.
• Threaded view
• Password protected forums
• Similar threads display
• Send an email "thanks for registering and welcome to .." on user registration (welcome email)
• Validity check for homepages
• Search engine friendly archive of open forums
• Happy b'day emails
• Much improved calander system (too many changes to mention)
• hit counter on announcements
• Digests: new posts/threads in selected forums daily/weekly/monthly
• "excerpt of message:" are now in the new reply email notifications
• 'report post to mod' sends anonymous copy to the original poster of the message
• Restyled FAQ section now looks similar to a forum

Posting

• WYSIWYG Editor for major text input fields (IE 5.5+Only)
• Minimum number of characters in post
• Insert smilie/vB code where cursor is (IE 5+ Only)
• Preview on edit
• Ability to add attachment when editing a post instead of just when creating
• Reason for editing
• Reason for deleting(for admins and mods)

User CP - Profile

• User Pictures - user can upload a personal picture. This picture is shown in the profile of the user.
• Completely revamped PM system (currently in work)
• Longer signature field with optional limit

Search

• Get daily for just one category
• Search only in subscribed forums
• A list of ignored words or words used in a search are added to the results page
• Option to find only started by 'username'
• Display matching forums in results
• Support for searching custom profile fields
• Search for exact username (e.g. turn off wildcards)

Polls

• Option for users to see who voted for which option (public vote)
• When you vote your name is highlighted when viewing results
• Poll results ordered by most to less voted
• Ability to post a poll AFTER a thread had started

--to the admin interface

General

• New admin cp front end
• Language Manager and vB Language packs (in work)
• Context sensitive help
• Improved attachment system. Statistics, Attachment types editing. Ability to delete old attachments. Ability to limit users to X number of bytes in total attachments. Option to "expire" attachments in CP.
• New FAQ System
• User ranking and karma admin
• New settings manager
• Help topics manager for the context sensitive help
• vBCode descriptions in the "What are vBCodes" link are now the actual descriptions in the database. No more editing the template.
• Add options to pick which groups appear on the memberlist, birthdays, etc
• Categories for Avatars and Smilies
• Ability to restrict "view new" to certain forums and groups of forums.
• Admins are exempt from the custom avatar post limit
• A "forum" can be just a link to something or somewhere else
• New merge/split/delete posts system
• A more complete set of subscription options for daily/weekly/on new posts updates, for forum, thread and board.

Utilities

• Admin can run REPAIR and OPTIMIZE on tables as a group or singularly (using mysql 3.23+)
• An SQL box in the admin section for executing general queries
• vBcron system
• Diagnostic tests for testing system compatibility and settings

User administration

• Admin editing of User's Avatar is more user friendly.
• Additional user profile fields - you can now add profile fields which can have either a single line text box, multi line text box, single selection radio buttons, single selection menu, multiple selection menu, or multiple selection checkboxs.
• Add user option in the admin CP to change the user's referrer
• Allow users to change usergroups automatically based on postcount
• Option to merge user accounts
• Search members based on custom profile field
• Email members based on custom profile field
• User notes -- A field for the admin to keep notes on the user
• Admin can designate moderators who can themselves set forum passwords.
• Place user under moderation
• Extended Moderator Activity Logging
• Add usergroup with permissions initially set as set for another group
• Improved email address ban
• Signature length control
• Resend for registration confirmation emails

Styles

• Completely revamped Style system
• You can place $post[postcount] in your postbit template to see each posts position in the thread
• Conditionals in templates. Also called vB Conditionals, these are "if" "then" "else" statements built directly into the templates. This gives the admin/designer improved flexibility in creating dynamic design

--to the programming

Code

• Autoselect forumid for search when clicking search button on toplinks from the forum.
• Todays birthdays to not always refresh the cached template when someone submits a profile.
• Improved post storage to reduce resource usage when showing threads.
• Use gmdate() and NOT date()
• All bbcode/smilies are stripped from posts BEFORE indexpost()
• Quoted text excluded from search.
• Associate searchid with userid so people can't insert searchid's and get results they're not supposed to see
• Who's Online code is moved to a function so that it can be used to figure out a single user's location, to be used in the user's profile and other places if need be
• Meta tags -- forum descriptions (and keywords?) are added to the Meta tags for each forum page
• Infinite parenting system for templates/replacements
• Attachment images (.gif,.jpg,,etc) are no longer in the database.
• Search system is improved with regards to speed. Even faster now!
• No more "nosessionhash" setting.
• No more use cookies setting
• MD5 password by javascript before it is sent to the server
• A second phpinclude template to be executed at the same time as dooutput() - to allow manipulation of elements already generated by the page
• An API for posting functions (newreply, newthread, newpoll, editpost)
• An option to have thread views updated hourly rather than immediately
• Improved bbcode parser
• An option for allowing a regex option to be specified for a custom profile field
• Moved banned email addresses out of the settings
• Remove check for attachments from mass-prune

Design

• Back to Top link at bottom of page
• "Want to register?" and "Forgotten your password?" before user/pass form fields, for using tab
• All user info cells are combined into one template

Usability

• Hitting the back button no longer necessary when you have too many images
• Option to save cookie *on this computer* when logging in
• Login/logout ability in all pages, with user/pass form -- single login system