Thanks for your continued support of vBulletin. It's been several years since the last major point release of vBulletin, and through all that time, your energy and enthusiasm have been inspiring to us. With the upcoming release of vBulletin 4.0 Forums and Publishing Suite, we want to re-engage and strengthen the ties between the core vB development team and all of you.

We just publicly unveiled vB 4.0 and there are some great new features, including:

-An awesome, and highly flexible CMS product (unveiling soon!)
-A Great new default theme
-SEO Urls
-Multi-content search capability

Along with some of these consumer facing changes, we've made some major changes to the internals, including:

-Validating XHTML markup
-A new templating system
-A new stylevar system

All in all, we're talking tens of thousands of lines of new and improved code. While this means your old styles will need rework and some of your plugins will break -- we're confident that all the new features and functionality we've added make up for it. Additionally, we have no designs on changing the styles or template system again in 5.0 (yes, we're already planning for 5.0), so you can be confident that your updates will have real longevity.

In addition to initializing this discussion of the developer impact of vB4, I want to take this opportunity to announce three major initiatives for the developer community.

vB 4 Plugin Prize
Starting soon, we'll kick off a contest with a cash prize for the best vB 4 hack or plugin.

Formal Developer Program
In the coming months, we'll unveil a formal vBulletin developer program which will include pre-release access to vB source code.

Monthly Developer Chats
We'll be hosting monthly, moderated live chats with the core developers of vB. The first chat will be 4pm PST on Tuesday, November 10th and will feature Kevin Sours, Lead VB Developer.

More details will be forthcoming for all of these, and we have more exciting plans that we're not yet ready to announce but will be discussing here soon.

Thanks for all your contributions, we wouldn't be here without you,

-Joe

Joe Rosenblum
CTO, Internet Brands, Inc.



Update: Submit and vote on questions for our first developer chat here: http://bit.ly/Y1NW0