ATTN: Upgrading Board

[Semper Fidelis]

Ladies and Gentlemen. I'll be upgrading the board from 3.6.4 to 3.6.7 shortly. The board will be offline while I'm doing that.

[Semper Fidelis]

Well the upgrade worked but now I have to get vBadvanced working again!

[Semper Fidelis]

Upgrade complete!!

Shwew. I get kind of scared when I have to do that kind of stuff. Let me know if you guys find any broken stuff. There are some significant improvements supposedly that I'll try to point out when I figure them out.

[Bladestunner316]

Thank's Rich for all your hard work!!!

[Theoretical]

[Pilgrim]

Thanks for your work on the PB, Rich.

[turmeric]

Yes, thanks!

[BobVigneault]

Great job Rich. Thank you SIR!

[NaphtaliPress]

Originally Posted by BobVigneault

Great job Rich. Thank you SIR!

Thanks Rich. Look forward to hearing of the improvements.

[Semper Fidelis]

Here's what it says. I realized after I read it that some of you might not notice all the improvements except that it will prepare the board for some new enhancements I might add in the near future.

vBulletin 3.6.6

It has been almost six months since our last bug-fix release (3.6.4) so the release of 3.6.6 represents a large number of fixes and tweaks to the system.

vBulletin 3.6.6 is the minimum required version for the upcoming vBulletin Blog and Project Tools products and includes various new hooks (including the much-requested fetch_musername hook) and code changes to accomodate these new systems. As a result, certain existing vBulletin features have been upgraded, such as date entry fields in the Admin CP, which now all feature the calendar popup date picker system designed for the project tools.

Setting the date of an announcement in the Admin CP with the new date picker

For the benefit of plugin authors, the information shown at the bottom of all vBulletin pages in debug mode is now greatly enhanced and shows not only all templates that have been called, but also all files that have been included by PHP and all hooks that have been encountered together with whether or not they executed code.

New debug info available in vBulletin 3.6.6

Complete list of problems and bugs fixed in vBulletin 3.6.6.

New Javascript Framework

With the use of AJAX and other client-side scripting systems increasing all the time, version 3.6.6 debuts various new methods of working with Javascript in vBulletin, many of which assist in the effort to remove as much Javascript from the templates as possible.

In order to facilitate this switch and to provide a solid framework on which to build, we have decided to employ the Yahoo! User Interface javascript library (YUI) for much of our DOM, event and XML-HTTP features, and in future versions you will see much greater use of this excellent library as we migrate some of our older Javascript code to a YUI base.

Included by default in vBulletin is the DOM/Event library (yahoo-dom-event.js) and the XML-HTTP connection handler (connection.js).

vBulletin 3.6.7

As much as we hate to spring another upgrade on you all so soon after the release of vBulletin 3.6.6, an XSS flaw was identified today and in order to maintain our commitment to fix security problems as soon as we become aware of them, we have to release 3.6.7 and a patch for older versions.

All versions of vBulletin 3.6 prior to 3.6.7 are vulnerable to the XSS. vBulletin 3.5.x and 3.0.x are not affected.

To minimize the pain of another upgrade, there are no changed templates since 3.6.6 and no database schema changes, so the upgrade should be as simple and quick as possible.

Since we have fixed several bugs since vBulletin 3.6.6 was released, these fixes are also incorporated in this version and include amongst others:

• RTL support for date picker popup
• Fixed HTML for archive forum lists
• MySQL error while merging users fixed
• Smilie parsing error fixed
• PHP 5.0.5 errors fixed
• Hard-coded image paths fixed

A complete list of bugs fixed in the 3.6 branch is available in the project manager.

[NaphtaliPress]

"upcoming vBulletin Blog and Project Tools products"
This sounded interesting Rich; can you tell us more about it?

[Semper Fidelis]

Originally Posted by NaphtaliPress

"upcoming vBulletin Blog and Project Tools products"
This sounded interesting Rich; can you tell us more about it?

I'm actually pretty excited about it too. The blog product sounds pretty neat and could be a great feature for people here, replacing their need for blogger potentially:

Blog and Social Networking

In response to user requests we have been working on a blogging system that will fully integrate with vBulletin. vBulletin Blog (a working title) will allow sites running vBulletin to extend the functionality to allow forum users to maintain weblogs from their user control panel and leverages the extensive vBulletin permissions system to enable administrators to fine-tune the features available to their visitors.

Blogs can be made private, with blog authors themselves able to create a list of users permitted to view their messages, while the vBulletin inline moderation system makes it easy to ensure that blogs and comments do not contain unwanted material.

Trackback and pingback support is fully integrated, so site owners can expect to quickly find related sites linking back to their own, improving search engine rankings and building traffic.

Additionally, vBulletin Blog adds social networking functionality to your vBulletin installation, which will allow your users to quickly and safely make connections and form relationships. Member profile pages are extended to include an enhanced buddy system, visitor tracking, blog integration and a comment system, all housed within a new and improved profile page template together with improved delivery of existing profile information.

As usual with vBulletin, every feature and template can be endlessly customised via the admin control panel, and can be extended even further with additional 3rd party plugins.

We are committed to developing tools to enhance your community and unite your members, and with the introduction of blogging and social networking support, vBulletin has become an advanced, exciting, platform on which your community can grow and flourish.

Project Tools

During the development process for the new products, it became clear that it would be necessary to develop a means of managing each new product from conception to completion, and to keep track of progress on multiple projects in one central interface.

To that end, it was decided to merge our existing bug tracker and internal feature tracker into a new, purpose-built system that would support multiple projects and be far more flexible in its application.

It soon became clear as this system was being written that it could be used for managing many other project types as well as software development. Given the number of requests we've had in the past for the bug tracker to be released, the decision was taken to go the extra step and make the system available to customers as an add-on product for vBulletin.

vBulletin Project Tools (also a working title) is the result of that development effort. We have been using the new tools internally for some time now and they have made significant improvements to the way we can keep tabs on how development is progressing. We intend to migrate our existing bug tracker to the new system next week, at which point everyone will be able to have a look around the system.

[greenbaggins]

Yes, blogger can go. I really do not like blogger. They still do not have trackback and pingback. Neither do they have good stats. I much prefer my wordpress blog. But this looks interesting. I hope that many will take advantage of it.