PHP Programming Language - Cultural View

vBulletin 343
• A database-stored thread-marking system was added. Previous versions of vBulletin relied on a variable stored in
the database, and also a cookie to store information about what threads had been read and not read by the user.
However, this information was volatile and did not keep; additionally, if you idled for 15 minutes (some forums
have longer timeouts, 15 minutes is the default) this information would be lost.
vBulletin 3.6 introduced features such as the multi-quote system, the infractions system, the ability to automatically
post threads and announcements from RSS feeds, and podcasting support. The Gold release of vBulletin 3.6.0 [5] was
released on August 3, 2006.
A first look at vBulletin 3.7 was announced on November 23, 2007. [6] It was officially released on April 29, 2008. [7]
New features in 3.7 included an inline
spam management & prevention system,
thread tagging and tag cloud, thread
prefixes, reciprocal friendship between
users, public visitor messaging on user
profile pages, user picture albums,
user-created social groups,
user-customizable profile pages, a
lightbox viewer for images attached to
posts, post edit history, a notices system,
multiple human verification systems, and
social bookmarking integration.
Version 3.8 introduced more new
features, such as social group discussions,
vBulletin 3.7.0 Admin Control Panel
social group categories, private message sorting and filtering options, private message history, quick edit for newer
types of content (visitor messages and picture comments), social group icons, social group transfers, a private
message quick reply box, private message throttling (limit messages sent over a time period), private message
reporting, profile privacy (limit blocks to a subset of users), lightbox navigation, thread prefix permissions, and
dismissible notices.
The latest stable release of vBulletin is 3.8.5 which was released on March 11, 2010, and is a maintenance release,
additionally rolling in two previous patches to 3.8.4.
vBulletin 4
vBulletin 4 was released December 21, 2009. New for vBulletin 4 is the vBulletin production suite, which includes
CMS and blog functions.
Future development
Rumors and hints about the development of the next generation vBulletin product, vBulletin 4, have been dropped by
developers and discussed endlessly by users for several years now.
On August 4, 2008, Kier Darby, former lead developer of vBulletin announced the development of vBulletin 3.8 and
vBulletin 4.0. [8] vBulletin 4 was described in this announcement as "an extensive rewrite of the vBulletin system.
Architecturally, vBulletin 4 follows MVC (model-view-controller) object oriented principles, allowing far greater
capabilities in code re-use and extendability." At the time, the requirements of vBulletin 4 were "PHP 5.2.3 and
MySQL 5.0.22 or newer".
On December 15, 2008, James Limm, Managing Director of Jelsoft, posted the vBulletin 4 Series Development
Update [9] with significant differences from the August announcement.