vBulletin 3.7 First Look!

[Kier]

User profile style customization is now enabled here on vBulletin.com.

You can access it through your UserCP.

Note that while you can choose to view other users' profiles without their customizations, you must always view your own profile with whatever customizations you have made. This was done purposefully to try to discourage people from making truly gruesome-looking profile pages, as they have to suffer the styles themselves.

Have fun

[Kier]

vBulletin.com is now running with 3.7.0 Beta 1 code.

For the time being, profile style modification is disabled because we want to concentrate bug reporting on other areas right now.

Enjoy!

Please report any bugs using the vBulletin Project Tracker

[Kier]

Answers and Clarifications for a Few Issues Raised in the Discussion Thread

YUI
I've seen several people post who seem to be under the impression that we are now using YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) instead of vBulletin code for several of our Javascript components.

This is not the case. What we are doing is using YUI for some of its abstract methods, such as DOM manipulation, event handling and AJAX connection management. We are not using any YUI widgets such as pop-up calendars, rich text editors etc. All of these functions remain and will always be vBulletin proprietary code.

Javascript Minimization
There has been a lot of talk in this thread about minimizing our javascript so that it can be compressed more. Well that's very lucky, because one of the changes we have made for 3.7 is to alter our javascript files so that they can be run through the YUI minimizer. Since the start of development of 3.7 we have intended to supply vBulletin with minimized javascript files (though of course there will be an option to download the commented, nicely-spaced versions too).

Social Group Public Messaging
Just to clarify, vBulletin social groups do have their own messaging system, which acts in the same way as public messaging for individual users. Each group has the facility to leave messages so you could consider each group to have its own single thread (although internally it does not actually use the vBulletin thread system)

Profile Rating
vBulletin 3.7 does not have a profile rating system. As I stated in the dicussion thread, I believe that the existing reputation system offers a far superior way to rate users rather than an arbitrary 1-5 or 1-10 rating applied to their profile.

Images in Title Bars for Right-Column Blocks
The different images visible in the title bars of blocks in the right column are collapse gadgets. A new image was created in order to work with any background color, as the existing collapse images are matted to specific colors and would not work correctly.

[Kier]

And More...

There are plenty more new features in vBulletin 3.7.

Here is a brief list of some of the ones we haven't yet touched on:

• Visitor tracking on profile pages
• Automatic resizing of attached images to match filesize or pixel dimensions
• Enhancements to custom bbcode system
• Custom icons per forum
• Advertisement locations defined in templates
• Add multiple moderators in one go through ACP
• ATOM support for RSS Poster Robot
• Hooks to allow attachments to be passed through a virus scanner
• Posts by users in 'Tachy Goes to Coventry' will no longer count towards the total number of posts in a thread or forum. They are now truly hidden!
• All AJAX systems now employ the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) for a more consistent and predictable system
• YUI files can now be switched from locally hosted to remotely hosted by Yahoo! with a single option change, saving you bandwidth

We hope you will be pleased by the work we have put into vBulletin 3.7. We are all proud of the end result and look forward to letting you all use it for yourselves on Monday.

Until then...

Discuss this announcement here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=249461

[Kier]

Social Bookmarking of Threads

Administrators can now define a list of their favorite social bookmarking sites and have them available for use on the showthread page for bookmarking threads.

[Kier]

User Change History

In order to track changes made to users' profiles by administrators, a change log is now kept for various user profile fields including username, usergroup etc.

[Kier]

New Human Verification Systems

In addition to the image verification system available in previous versions of vBulletin, 3.7 introduces the means for the administrator to choose the verification system employed on their board.



They may choose to use the popular RECAPTCHA™ system, or to define a set of questions and answers for their visitors to deal with.

[Kier]

Navbar Notices

Administrators can now set up custom notifications that will appear underneath the navbar when visiting users fulfil specified criteria.

For example, one may want to set up a notice to display when a user is a member of a particular usergroup, or to show a congratulatory message when a user has posted their 1,000th post etc.

[Kier]

Inline Moderation Enhanced Authentication

When performing inline moderation actions, board staff will now be required to re-authenticate themselves if they have not done so in their browsing session.

This prevents the possibility of unauthorized parties acting as a moderator on a public computer where a board staff member has accidentally ticked the 'remember me' box.

[Kier]

Post Edit History

For boards where the history of posts is important, it is now possible to log all edits to posts and then review the changes at a later date.

[Kier]

Attachment Viewing Lightbox

Clicking on an attached image will now open a lightbox rather than open a new window, with the image scaled to fit the browser viewport. A click on the image in the lightbox will open it in a new window as before.

[Kier]

Inline Editing of Profile Field Values

The 'About Me' tab of each member's profile page has edit controls, allowing them to quickly change values without leaving their profile page.

[Kier]

Member Customization of Profile Page

The administrator may choose to allow his members to use the profile page customization tool, which allows users to alter fonts, colors, background and borders etc. of their profile page in order to create a more personalized look.



The administrator can lock-down customization permissions, in order to prevent the personalized pages being made too offensively awful by aesthetically challenged members... nobody wants to see some of those really ugly MySpace pages on your vBulletin installation!

[Kier]

New Member Profile Page

In order to accomodate all the new features in vBulletin 3.7, the member profile page has been completely redesigned from the ground up.

The new page presents information in a far cleaner and more logical manner, while dividing up information into manageable chunks using a tabbed interface.

Individual profile field categories can be displayed alone in blocks in the right column, in addition to appearing by default in the 'About Me' tab.

[Kier]

User-Created Social Groups

To further social cohesion between users and to encourage people to make friends, vBulletin now includes a facility to allow users to create their own social/interest groups.



These groups are enhanced by having their own public messaging system, and the ability to add pictures to the group from user albums.