It is not feature-comparable to vBulletin, but for my purposes, that's not really important at this stage. I know that sounds fanboish, but hear me out...
Tens of thousands of customers bought vBulletin 4 on faith and based on the strength of the name. Even after 8 revisions since beta, there is widespread disappointment. As a result, many people are sitting on vBulletin 4 licenses they are not using. Further, there are doubts that the vBulletin Solutions is building a foundation stable enough to support a software suite. Despite trebling their development staff, software development pace seems to have been stunted.
Looking long term when you put your faith in a product to power your website, you must take a long hard look at the codebase. Is this codebase robust and modular enough to support my site going forward, support addition of new features without ugly hacks, and also integrate with third party solutions I might want to add? Thus far, the "new codebase" of vBulletin Forum and vBulletin CMS are going the opposite direction. A closed system that is increasingly proprietary.
In vBulletin, we've seen the addition of a hard-wired StyleVar system that is antithetical to the purpose of Cascading Style Sheets. We've seen numerous code regressions and community features being removed because they are
inconvenient to the developers to continue to support. We've also seen close analysis of this "new codebase" for the CMS which has been touted as the new foundation for vBulletin's future. When comparing new and old code side-by-side, the new code should be a slam dunk, but instead I'm hearing a lot of deep concern that the CMS codebase is not robust enough to even dream of putting a forum on top of it.
So you have two camps:
- People who bought licenses for vB4 beta software that is looking like a dead end.
- People like me with vB3.x licenses for stable software that is undoubtedly a dead end.
Do we jump on IPB, which is a different philosophy, a bit of a more closed system, and very restrictive of negative criticism? Or do we go back to basics -- a handful of software developers with a love for elegant code?
I hate to say it, but it's time to write off those vB4 licenses and chalk it up to lessons learned. I did everything I could to warn people that this was not your father's vBulletin, and to look closely at what was being offered before going in blind, but it happened anyway. For 9 years, vBulletin did a good job of building brand identity. Nobody wanted to believe that it could be destroyed in 3 months. I think long-term, the vB4 gamble is not going to pay off. I know that having a "vision" doesn't put the butts in the seats, but I grew to love vBulletin because when I read developer posts, I immediately sensed "This is someone who is focusing on core values". Even if I didn't get all the features I wanted, and hey I threw up a fuss on a few obvious fixes, overall, the software seemed in good hands.
So let's look forward to what software will be powering our communities 18 months ~ 2 years from now. I know forum admins like to plan in advance. I've read their posts on vB.com asking for a roadmap for the last year, and asking for more information to help them plan site migrations and revamps.
So I'm not looking at XenForo now. I'm looking at what XenForo will be in 12 months. Will it be ready to take over the responsibility of my communities? Based on the quality and speed of the forums here, I have no doubts. I have faith that the coding and templates will be of a quality comparable to what we have received during the prime years of vBulletin development.
I am hoping that within 6 months of XenForo's release, there will be dozens of styles and dozens of plugins which rival vBulletin.
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