Future Upgrade to VB5 & Customization

[xeraingaming]

Hi,

We have been looking for another solution for our website. At the moment we use Joomla, but we don't think it's right for the site. In the future we want to create a popular forum space for our viewers to use and for this we have been looking at VBulletin and other forum solutions out there.

One thing I dislike about Vbulletin 4 is the horrible bar at the top, how easy is it to customize this? I would love a really clean white layout solution which is slick and clean. I checked the VB 5 demo and I really like the 'look' of it, unfortunately it seems extremely slow and this puts me off from wanting to use it. BUT if we were to buy VB now, it says that we will get V5 included, so how easy would it be to upgrade our forum to V5 from version 4?

We would also be looking at having subscriptions for VIP users. I am guessing these features are already built in? It seems so looking here: https://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/...ptions_example

In summary:

How easy is it to customize the template (colours and the header bar)

How easy will it be to install version 5 on a version 4 site.

Are there Payment subscription features in the forum package.



Many thanks,
Danny

[wave-rice]

1) That depends how good your HTML/CSS skills are. You can always post in the forums for help.

2) The upgrade process is simple and there is a few pieces of documentation that walk you through the process. The only thing is, if you use the CMS with your vBulletin 4 site, it won't be available straight out of the box with vBulletin 5 as it needs more work. A later update will bring back CMS functionality to vBulletin 5.

3) In vBulletin 4, yes. Not in vBulletin 5 yet.

[xeraingaming]

Thanks for your reply, I went ahead and purchased the software.
We are already setting things up but I have a question...

I would like user thumbnails to display in the thread view 'Last Post'. So on the forum home, it displays all the latest posts in each thread in the right hand column, how can I get the users thumbnails to display too?

Thanks
Danny

[BirdOPrey5]

This is a Pre-Sales forum for pre-sales questions. Please ask questions on how the forum works in a proper support forum.

However if by thumbnails you mean avatars, there is no built in option for that- you would need to look for a free modification at www.vbulletin.org - (Almost) anything not built into vBulletin can be found on vBulletin.org.