It will be interesting to see what TonyL comes up with should he upgradeââ'¬Â¦
IMHO vBulletin have put it's users in quite an awkward position with the v3 upgrade. This is a
huge change to the software, and predictably it has bloated to a quite absurd extent ââ'¬â€œ the .php and image files that make up the system has bulked up from 1.5Mb to a whopping 5.4Mb. It adds a load of features that many such as myself actively do not want (and a few that I really do). With the new features comes a lot of additional complexity behind the scenes.
This is also not a easy upgrade to carry out, the whole look and feel is so radically different, and in my opinion the default skin (you get but one) is so truly gross that I wouldn't be seen dead running it ââ'¬â€œ this forces you to develop your own skin immediately (including a new button set as the supplied blue ones look like they were done by a baboon on acid who had watched way too much TV involving Linda Barker - I'm convinced the damn things are made out of MDF). The amount of work Michael has put in getting this place to look like the ZG we all know and love should not be underestimated, a serious amount of effort has gone into this, and I'm genuinely amazed at how successfully he has pulled it off in such a short time. Respect!
Regardless my subjective impression is that the new version here is slower than the oldââ'¬Â¦
My main concern is how long vBulletin intend to support v2.x ââ'¬â€œ ideally I'd like not to be forced to upgrade, though I'm actually doing some of the preparation work now so I'll have for example a full set of 'non-shite' buttons and icons etc ready for when I may need them. But I'm not going to rush into it until I
fully understand the speed and bandwidth aspects. I suspect the new ZG is slower ââ'¬â€œ I always used to think ZG felt faster than pfm, now I feel it's a little slower, especially when waiting for the 'full' post reply page to come up etc.
I'm learning a lot from ZG with regards to this upgrade, every tweak and improvement Michael is doing is being very carefully noted
I'm going to take pfm to v2.3.5 first ââ'¬â€œ I'm not even at the latest v2 level! That's easy ââ'¬â€œ it only takes 10 minutes or so. I'll probably wait until the next v3 point release and make a final decision at that pointââ'¬Â¦
Tony.