Last night, we closed the site for 3 hours while we updated the Members Area for the next installment of VaultWiki. If you managed to purchase any addons before we discontinued them, they will still be available in your Members Area as a separate download. However, beginning with VaultWiki 3.0.0 Beta 1, Premium users will no longer have to download and install them as separate products - Categories, Images, Xpages, and the others have all been packaged together and integrated with VaultWiki's upgrade system.
After 2 months, we're pleased to announce the first VaultWiki release that is compatible with vBulletin 4. vBulletin 4 owners will notice a level of integration that simply is not possible with vBulletin 3 forums, and at least for this first release, will see the majority of new features. We do have new features planned for vBulletin 3 forums, but these will be forthcoming in the next few betas.
The first thing many users will notice is the addition of new icons (
,
,
) to the editor. Oddly enough, previous releases never had a button for links to the default wiki space. The other buttons remind users that it's possible to add wiki images to your posts, and it's also possible to categorize your wiki content.
Aside from buttons, the most significant change that affects all vBulletin platforms is that we've rewritten several portions of the back-end to improve performance during administrative tasks on the wiki. We've removed a number of expensive database queries from these processes, and portioned the remaining changes to reduce load on the server.
With the addition of content types in vBulletin 4, we've been able to integrate with the Search in a more user-friendly fashion. Simply selecting the "Wiki content pages" type will display a list of wiki locations for you to search from in a more intuitive interface than VaultWiki for vB3's Special:Search page. In fact, these changes will allow us to integrate Special pages directly with wiki search in an upcoming beta.
One of the strong points of vBulletin 4 is the brand new Asset Manager, a form that appears when managing attachments that shows all attachments the user has already uploaded, in case they wish to use it more than once, and provides an easy-to-use button for inserting that attachment into the post.
VaultWiki 3 takes this one step further, by adding a new folder to the Asset Manager containing all images that have been uploaded to the wiki's Image space, even if they were posted by other users. Clicking the "Insert Inline" button will place the image in your post using the wiki's Image BB-Code.
One of VaultWiki's most powerful admin tools is the Wiki Style Manager, where admins can apply their own CSS rules to meld the wiki seamlessly into their site's existing design. vBulletin 4 made some significant improvements to its own CSS design, which reduced the amount of code VaultWiki had to use.
Additionally, vBulletin 4 introduced the StyleVar Manager, which contains hundreds of variables that control the overall look of the forum. In VaultWiki 3, the CSS has been modified to use many of these StyleVars. This means that VaultWiki will automatically inherit a site's design and should require minimal stylistic changes to achieve seamless visual integration.
This is a
Beta release. Please take the necessary precautions before installing it in a production environment. We encourage users to take advantage of our support forums and bug tracker to help make this product the best that it can be.
Unfortunately, at this time we cannot provide a demo of VaultWiki running on the vBulletin 4 platform (we are still running vBulletin 3.8). While we intend to upgrade in the future, this isn't something we can do until our bug tracker has been ported. We will be adding screen shots shortly to demonstrate the vBulletin 4-only material.
