In August, we announced a major overhaul of the code base. Rather than targeting all of these changes in a single, long-term release, we intend to accomplish all the planned improvements over a number of versions. In order to achieve this goal, the largest vBulletin development team ever assembled is now working within an Agile development process, allowing us to deliver new features into your hands faster.

Each incremental release in the vBulletin 4 series will include improvements in features, usability and architecture. Development efforts are prioritized towards those areas that can provide real, tangible benefits to our customers, at all times with an eye toward maintaining and enhancing the performance and reliability expected of a vBulletin product.

The goal of the vBulletin 4 series is to develop a modern, scalable application platform that will allow your communities to thrive.

Key features and improvements that will be included in the first vBulletin 4 release are:

• Cross-content search system providing a single interface to search across forum posts, blog entries and comments and other supported products
• Improved search performance
• A fresh design and layout making use of semantic markup and CSS styling
• An enhanced style and template system to enhance your ability to change the layout
• Controls to assist with the placement of advertising elements
• SEO features, including friendly URLs
• A centralized attachment system, allowing the sharing of attachments across products

Alongside significant strides forward within the vBulletin forum product, we are also producing a new content management system to facilitate the creation, editing and publishing of non-forum pages. Further details about CMS features, and how it will integrate with vBulletin will be posted in due course.

We are working hard and plan to have vBulletin 4.0 released in beta form in early Q2 of 2009.

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your continuing support of vBulletin. We are really excited about version 4, and we’re looking forward to bringing you further updates via general announcements and periodic development blog posts focusing on individual areas.