Hi, thought I should join in the conversation. Firstly, I know where everyone is coming from. We have said VaultWiki 4 was on the brink of release for 2 years (development was roughly 2 years 6 months). And sure this would raise questions about if it would ever come out or we were just talk-talking. Since VaultWiki 4 is available now for newer versions of vBulletin (with XenForo, I shudder to use the word, "soon"), I guess I should offer some information about what exactly took us so long.
For those who want to skip ahead of the history, I've enclosed it in ---s
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To be perfectly honest we had never done an undertaking like this before. VaultWiki had always been a vBulletin add-on and couldn't really stand on its own. Rewriting VaultWiki was like writing an entirely new software. But as some others have mentioned, this might have taken other programmers 6 months or less. Unfortunately for the most part we only had one programmer starting out, so this should have given us a time frame of 9 - 12 months. We were only familiar though with updating VaultWiki for newer versions of vBulletin, so we significantly underestimated how long it would take. Not only that, but writing a stand-alone program is one thing. Writing something so abstract that it could be an add-on (without bridging) for any forum platform is another thing. Some days we just sat there for hours trying to come up with a code design for something and thinking our heads were going to explode.
We were actually largely done with VaultWiki 4 at around 9 months, and then vBulletin announced it was releasing a new editor... and they used the word "soon." So we waited, and after the first month went by, we decided we should do some further development. And instead of that, we basically threw out everything we had done with the user interface and data management and started over, because we knew it could be better. We started over and embarked on another 12 month journey. Let me just say that at this point we had never actually run VaultWiki outside of the admin interface. We had been working on something for the better part of 2 years and never got to see what it looked like. It's one thing to hear about and wait for something that you think might not actually exist. It's another thing to work on something that you're not sure actually exists. It was a depressing time indeed.
This brings us to 2nd quarter 2012 when we decided it was time to see what we had made, and thought it would be nice to share our experience of that with others. So we set up an Alpha-test server, and that test went on for about 2 months. Mind you, the core of VaultWiki 4 was done. vBulletin 4 was done. We got some great feedback during that time. While users were privately testing, despite people recommending against it due to the pending litigations, we worked on the XenForo version. By the end of summer, we almost finished it.
And then disaster hit. Real-life, software-unrelated. One disaster after another. More than one staff member leaving. Waste management systems failures. Floods. Car accidents. No heat or hot water. VaultWiki 4 was done for months, and it seemed like the universe didn't want us to spend the week it would take to write a packager so that we could release it. But we did.
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Which brings me to the problems we had upgrading our site. Yeah, we did. These were not usual problems that any other users, we think, should ever be faced with. We run a proprietary SVN-like server-side script that arranges builds as we modify the product and delivers the builds we want as releases to the public. And to make sure all code is thoroughly tested, the web site runs the most recent file revisions as its VaultWiki installation. That's not something anyone else would do; you would just upload the script to your directory of choice and that's it. No, we had to make changes to VaultWiki and figure out what paths to use so that we could run it right out of SVN. And on top of that, again unlike most users, every part of our site is dependent on VaultWiki. Our shopping cart script, our Members area, our user documentation, they are all VaultWiki scripts or rely on VaultWiki functions, and they all had to be updated. While some of these things were things we prepared for in a staging area, a lot was missed until users started complaining.
As for where we are with the XenForo release, I'm not going to go down the road again where I go with my feeling on the matter. All the XenForo stuff is done and we have a XenForo packager written and confirmed working. It feels like I could just click "Checkout" in the next few days and it will be released. But realistically, there's still a bit of debugging to do. It all works on vBulletin, but XenForo is a different (and much less forgiving animal). And now that we have the vBulletin version released and people are actually using it, bug reports are starting to come in. This distracts developers. They can't fix new bug reports and debug looking to make their own at the same time. While it feels like a few days, and while I would like it to be by the end of the month, in all reality, it probably won't be until the end of April, but I'll go the safe route and say sometime Q2 2013.
Unless something else bad happens like a fire or earthquake. I'm waiting. An earthquake in New York, it would happen now.
