Themes by Design upgrading

We've received many inquiries into when TbD plans to upgrade to newer versions of vBulletin.

In light of the announcements, made this morning from vBulletin.com, concerning 3.7.5 and 3.8.0, we'd like to bring our members and clients up-to-date on our plans.

We have not upgraded to 3.7.4 because our 3.7.3 styles work flawlessly on 3.7.4, and will on 3.7.5, so we don't intend to upgrade to 3.7.5.

However, vBulletin announced that they will release 3.8.0 on Jan 7. Therefore we will be upgrading the Themes by Design forum to 3.8.0 over the coming weekend. Please note that the forum here will be closed while this upgrade takes place. It takes a while to update all of these styles, create an xml file and re-package the zip.

For those of you who do not intend to upgrade to 3.8.0, you will still be able to download the 3.7.3 zip files, as they will still be offered in addition to the 3.8.0 zip files. However, the site itself and our styles, will all be upgraded to 3.8.0.

Please be advised that, by March 1, you'll not be able to download 3.6 versions of our styles, as they will be discontinued, and the zip files will be deleted. We now want to focus our attention on versions 3.7 and 3.8.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask in this thread.

Thanks!

Ok we're open again folks. However, only a few of our styles have been upgraded to 3.8. I'll be working on this into tomorrow. The 3.8 zip files for each style should be available here by Tuesday. You can, however, still access the 3.7 zip files.

Thanks for your patience!

Peggy could you tell me what is different with 3.8 -- i really don't know if i want to upgrade if there is not some good reason to do it.
thanks

Tom I'm sorry, I just saw your post.

I haven't had a chance yet to really look through the new features, so I had to go to the release thread to get an answer for you.

According to the release post, the new features consist of -


Social group discussions (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/blog.php?b=2329)
Social group categories (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/blog.php?b=2329)
Private message sorting and filtering (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/blog.php?b=2332)
Private message history (http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/blog.php?b=2338)
Quick edit for newer types of content (visitor messages and picture comments)
Social group icons
Social group transfers
Private message quick reply
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
Dismissible notices


As I said, I really haven't investigated any of the newer features, so I have no info about them at this time.
If you want my opinion, unless your forum utilizes the social groups features, which seem to be prevalent in this new version, then I see no real need to upgrade immediately, although I do recommend upgrading at some point in the near future.

thanks!

You're welcome.

Please be advised that not all of our themes will be upgraded to 3.8. So if you use or see a particular theme that you'd specifically like updated for use, please post the request on that release thread.

3.8 is going to bring you some new forum themes, many with a "web 2.0" flair.
So be watching!