Upgrading vBulletin.com to 4.0 tomorrow

10-22-2009, 05:50 AM

We know everyone is anxious to see vB4 in action, so here it comes! We are planning to upgrade vBulletin.com to vB4 starting very early tomorrow morning. The plan is to put /forums/ into maintenance mode in the middle of the night (Pacific time) and be live again by mid-morning. Please note that this rollout will be an early beta release. By early, I mean really early, much earlier than betas have historically been rolled out on vb.com. It is not a release candidate, so there will be rough spots, which we're still working on, but we are choosing to make this available now in order to give you the earliest possible view of what is being built. This initial rollout will include Forums and Blog, as well as an internal build of Project Tools. It will not initially include CMS, but that will follow soon afterward. We have tested the upgrade process in a staging environment, and we are confident that it should go well. In the event that something doesn't go as planned, we will simply revert to the current installation of 3.8.4, fix what breaks, and try again. In anticipation of the expected questions... *Why didn't you wait until the product was more "done"?* To give you the earliest possible view of the new vB4. *Why didn't you wait until the CMS could be released along with Forum and Blog? *To give you the earliest possible view of the new vB4. *Why aren't you delaying the release until feature _____ is implemented?* In the spirit of release early, release often (http://radio.weblogs.com/0103807/sto...easeOften.html), we want to get releases out to customers *early*, in order to get real-world feedback, and *often*, so that they can start benefiting from basic features as soon as they are available, with more advanced features following shortly after in subsequent releases. See you in the morning!

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