[Code Monkey]

Announcing the First Official vBulletin Add-on Products



Building on the plug-in architecture offered by vBulletin 3.6, the development team have been hard at work creating new products to widen the gamut of features available to sites running vBulletin.



The first of these new products are now entering the final phase of internal development and testing and will soon be unleashed. This initial batch of products consists of two applications, both of which attach to a new or existing vBulletin installation.



These products have been entirely developed by the core vBulletin development team, rather than being third-party scripts that have been bought-in and adapted, so customers can expect the same level of quality and support as they have become accustomed to with the main vBulletin Forum system.



Blog and Social Networking



In response to user requests we have been working on a blogging system that will fully integrate with vBulletin. vBulletin Blog (a working title) will allow sites running vBulletin to extend the functionality to allow forum users to maintain weblogs from their user control panel and leverages the extensive vBulletin permissions system to enable administrators to fine-tune the features available to their visitors.



Blogs can be made private, with blog authors themselves able to create a list of users permitted to view their messages, while the vBulletin inline moderation system makes it easy to ensure that blogs and comments do not contain unwanted material.



Trackback and pingback support is fully integrated, so site owners can expect to quickly find related sites linking back to their own, improving search engine rankings and building traffic.



Additionally, vBulletin Blog adds social networking functionality to your vBulletin installation, which will allow your users to quickly and safely make connections and form relationships. Member profile pages are extended to include an enhanced buddy system, visitor tracking, blog integration and a comment system, all housed within a new and improved profile page template together with improved delivery of existing profile information.



As usual with vBulletin, every feature and template can be endlessly customised via the admin control panel, and can be extended even further with additional 3rd party plugins.



We are committed to developing tools to enhance your community and unite your members, and with the introduction of blogging and social networking support, vBulletin has become an advanced, exciting, platform on which your community can grow and flourish.



Project Tools



During the development process for the new products, it became clear that it would be necessary to develop a means of managing each new product from conception to completion, and to keep track of progress on multiple projects in one central interface.



To that end, it was decided to merge our existing bug tracker and internal feature tracker into a new, purpose-built system that would support multiple projects and be far more flexible in its application.



It soon became clear as this system was being written that it could be used for managing many other project types as well as software development. Given the number of requests we've had in the past for the bug tracker to be released, the decision was taken to go the extra step and make the system available to customers as an add-on product for vBulletin.



vBulletin Project Tools (also a working title) is the result of that development effort. We have been using the new tools internally for some time now and they have made significant improvements to the way we can keep tabs on how development is progressing. We intend to migrate our existing bug tracker to the new system next week, at which point everyone will be able to have a look around the system.



Next Update....



We are keen to keep you informed during the final stages of development of these new products. Keep an eye on the vBulletin announcement forum over the next few weeks for feature lists, screenshots and details of our plans for beta testing!



This is a very exciting time for the vBulletin team, and at this stage I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support. We do read every suggestion posted in these forums, and continue to work hard to develop stable, feature-rich, software solutions.

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