Upgrading my site from 3.8.x

[bada_bing]

We are looking to upgrade our site with over 14K members to the latest version of VB, can someone on the VB staff please explain what are the proper upgrade path. Should we upgrade to vb 4.2 first then go to 5 when releasted or should we just wait for version 5 to be official then upgrade from 3.8 to 5?

Also we have lots of mods on our site including SEO addon and wondering if we can just install the latest version of vbulletin (5) and just point to the database> please help with this.

[Trevor Hannant]

You can go straight from 3.8.x to 5.x or to 4.2 in the meantime, it's entirely up to you. If you choose to move to 4.2 first, you would need to consider the fact that your users will have their experience changed twice in potentially short amounts of time.

Upgrading will always overwrite any hacks or changes you made to the vB files. However you will have to disable and/or remove any add-ons prior to upgrading to vB4/5. After the upgrade you can contact the authors of those add-ons to see if they have updated versions.

Also any custom styles and templates from vB 3.x will not be compatible with vB4/5. You will have to redo your customizations after upgrading.