This is correct. Blog, Project Tools and CMS will not be distributed as separate products, but will be bundled with the vBulletin Suite.

In answer to some of the questions about this…

Why will these components only be available as part of the Suite?

There are two reasons for this change. The first is that with so many separate components, keeping them synchronized was unnecessarily inefficient from a coding standpoint. There’s just too much engineering overhead to maintain them all on separate development tracks. And since we want to be able to develop quickly and get releases out to you more frequently, we made the decision to keep all components in sync as part of a single code base.

The second reason is that it provides much greater opportunities for tighter integration between the products, such as the ability to convert blog posts (or forum posts) to articles, to have forum discussions attached to CMS content, etc.

The whole idea is to make vBulletin better, faster, and these changes will help us develop new features more quickly. They will also help as we dive into the deeper round of rearchitecture with 4.1 and 4.2.

Does that mean I’ll be running lots of extra code?

No. vBulletin runs only the code it needs for any given page load, so if you’re not using a component, its code won’t run and it won’t impact the performance of the application.

Can I turn off components I don’t want to use?

Yep, just turn them off from the Admin CP, and they’ll be disabled.

We’ve made a lot of progress toward the alpha release on the two remaining fronts:

• Template conversion – This is the monster task, and the primary work remaining before we begin the alpha testing cycle on the Forums product. As anyone who has done major template modifications can attest, this is hard work, and there are more than five hundred templates to get through in Forums alone. As of today, more than 75% the templates have been started and more than a third are ready for alpha. As soon as the rest are ready, Forums will be released to begin alpha testing. (The alpha cycle for Suite will follow shortly after.)

• CMS enhancements – As I reported in my last update, we made the decision to invest some additional time to make vB4’s new CMS component much better in terms of both usability and administrative controls. Yes, it’s taking a bit longer than in our initial plan, but I’m sure that when you see it in action you will agree that the extra time was a good investment.

When? When?? WHEN???

Soon! As much as I would like to be able to provide a hard date, the home stretch to release is the hardest part. However, the biggest team to ever work on vB in its 10-year history is the group that’s working on it now; your vB4 is in very good hands.

That said, I believe that we are within approximately four to five weeks of starting alpha testing. That’s subject to adjustment, of course, but that’s my best estimate as of today.

If you’re on the alpha team, get ready; it’s coming soon.

If you’ve applied to participate in beta, sit tight for a bit. I’ve received a few hundred applications, and I haven’t gotten through them all quite yet.

More to come…

As promised, I’d like to bring everyone up to date on the current vBulletin team, which is the largest in vBulletin’s history. All together, we have a solid hundred years or so (yikes!) of engineering expertise on the team, with a experience over a huge variety of software projects, including decades of experience working on vBulletin. The support team has similar depth of experience.

First, I’d like to introduce the newest new guy, Don Kuramura, who will take the lead on vB Product Management. Don will be responsible for all things marketing – the 4.x series roadmap, new product initiatives, product marketing and business development. Don’s social media expertise comes from both big companies (Sony Pictures, American Greetings Interactive) and entrepreneurial startups. He will be the primary one to work with the community to develop requirements for future vBulletin releases.

On the dev side, we are deeply appreciative of the work of all of the original vBulletin developers, including those still with us on the core team – Freddie, Darren and Jerry.

Here’s the whole team roster:

Management

• James Limm, Jelsoft Founder
• Ray Morgan, General Manager
• Don Kuramura, Product Manager

Engineering

• Kevin Sours – Kevin has been with IB for three years now. Prior to joining the vBulletin team, Kevin worked with several of IB’s vBulletin sites as lead developer for the Travel and Leisure group.
• Darren Gordon – "You all know our best developer, Darren…" Okay, Darren wrote that, but in all seriousness, he’s been part of the core vB team and is the chief architect of the new CMS.
• Ed Brown – Ed got degrees in Mechanical Engineering (there weren’t degrees in programming then). We won’t say when, but it was before Bill Gates founded Microsoft. PHP is currently Ed’s favorite language. Ed works on the new search engine and CMS system, including all the widgets to date.
• Freddie Bingham – With vBulletin since almost the very beginning, there’s hardly a piece of vB that Freddie hasn’t had a hand in.
• Jeff Greenberg – Our newest engineer and lead UI guru.
• Andy Huang – Andy is one of the developers from Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. and has been working on vBulletin code since 3.7. He spends most of his time working on bug fixes, but also works on some of the new features. Andy also supports vBulletin China.
• Jerry Hutchings – One of the old-time vB developers, still responsible for Impex development.

Customer Support

• Steve Machol – Steve has been a forum owner and Administrator since 1995 staring with Matt Wright’s WWWBoard script. In 2001 he switched over to vBulletin and soon afterwards was added to the vB staff and promoted to Customer Support Manager.
• Wayne Luke – Wayne started with Jelsoft after being the administrator of the Sitepoint Community Forums for several years. Over time, he felt that working directly with the software being used to power large forums would be more beneficial. As such he has provided sales and service support since January 2001 and helped pioneer the telephone support services in use today.
• Carrie Anderson – Carrie has been on the vB support team for the past year, before which she was a moderator on vBulletin.org since 2006.
• Colin Frei – Support team member since 2005, as well as developer of a lot of Jelsoft’s back-office systems.
• George Liu – George (aka eva2000) has been on the vB staff since July 2001. Based in Australia, he is the in-house server ‘guru’ and has been providing help with server questions and optimization requests ever since then.
• Jake Bunce – Support team member since 2002.
• Zachery Woods – Support team member since 2004.
• Kerry-Anne Peters – Support team member from January, 2007 through June 30; thanks KA!
• Marlena Machol – Marlena Machol joined Jelsoft in March 2007 and has been working behind the scenes on link submissions and maintaining the links pages.
• Marco van Herwaarden, vBulletin.org
• Xiaoyu Huang, vBulletin China
• Scott Molinari, vBulletin Germany

But wait, there’s more…

In addition to this core team, we have other key players like Jennifer Rundell (VP of Content at IB) and Michael Anders, who runs close to a hundred of IB’s vBulletin sites.

We also borrow as needed from other internal engineering groups, and these have included Chris Holland, Michael Clifford, David Bonilla, Prince Shah, Tully Rankin, Andrew Elkins, Pritesh Shah, and James Pestridge.

Last but not least, Team vB also enjoys the help from IB’s internal QA team – Allen Lin, Meghan Sensenbach and Fei Leung.

Please be aware that there is currently a problem with the email server and most of the forum and licensing emails are not being sent. For some reason customers are getting emails for replies on support tickets, but those seem to be the only emails going out at the moment.

Until this is fixed no password change requests (forum and licenses) are going through. If you have purchased a new license and have not received your info, please fill out a sales contact form here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/go/sales

Otherwise any other requests will need to wait until the server issue is resolves. I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.