db-tech's thoughts on vbulletin 5 connect

Brandon Regular Member

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I saw this on vbulletin.com and thought you guys would like to read it as well. This is what dragonbyte-tech thinks of vbulletin 5 connect.

As some of you may have noticed, we have our vB5 version of vBShout v6.1.0 [Lite] up on vBulletin.org here: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=288915
It's lacking some features compared to the vBulletin 4 version due to some design issues with vBulletin 5 that affects custom addons, which they are working on resolving.

A lot of people have asked me what my experience with vBulletin 5 has been, because they have heard a lot of negativity elsewhere, and every time they do I give the same answer: When taken into the context that this is a completely new piece of software, it's actually not that bad. That's the thing people have to realise; even though there's still plenty of legacy code in there, vBulletin 5 is still a completely new piece of software. The issues with moddability are simply down to the fact that the person that designed it didn't have the foresight of an oracle.
Think about it, if an architect designs a house based on a set of specifications, then years later the house is sold and a new family moves in, is it really the fault of the architect that the specific wall that family wants knocked down was a loadbearing wall?

The devs and brass at vBulletin have been awesome at helping push the priority and push fixes for moddability issues, so I have zero doubt that when it's all said and done, vBulletin 5 will be wide open for some truly amazing modifications.

More directly related to vBShout, to put it as succinctly as possible: The Site Builder is effin' awesome.
Being able to create modules that you, the users, can easily configure and drag to a position of your choice via an intuitive drag & drop interface? Hells to the yeah. If Iain has taught me anything about usability, it is that this kind of thing rocks.
Want to move the Shoutbox above the Welcome Panel? Go right ahead, you don't need us for obscure template variables and template editing instructions
Want to place the same Shoutbox instance at the bottom of your forums as well as up top? Go right ahead, you don't need us telling you it can't be done

This, plus the ability to call PHP code directly from the template system is simply awesome. It really frees you from the old system of having to mix templates in with PHP code. I've never been happy about the fact that I had to render templates into variables and inject that into another template that finally spits out the completed page. Yuk. It's messy and it makes it too easy to accidentally overwrite variables when everything is one big block of code.
vB5 solves this by letting you fetch certain variables you need only when and if you need them.

Don't even get me started on the way it handles AJAX requests. Would you like automatic return-value-to-JSON with full UTF-8 compatibility? Why yes, yes I would! JSON is by far the best way of handling passing data back from an AJAX request, but I couldn't get it working on vB3/vB4 without corrupting UTF-8 data (German umlauts, as an example of data that would be corrupted). vB5 handles this like a champ.

I feel like a kid in a brand new sandbox when I'm figuring out new cool things I can do with vB5 that lets me replace old code or make it more efficient. So long as I don't venture too far into the areas that remain unfinished, vB5 is a dream to work with.
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Brandon, Oct 16, 2012

#1

Bundy, cpvr, Dan Hutter and 1 other person like this.

Monster Admin Talk Staff

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Interesting to read something positive about vb5 for a change!

Monster, Oct 16, 2012

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Dan Hutter and Brandon like this.

cpvr Regular Member

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Monster said: ↑

Interesting to read something positive about vb5 for a change!
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Also an update from one of their developer's blogs https://www.vbulletin.com/forum/entry.php/2532-Upcoming-Performance-Improvements

We’ve been working hard at improving performance of the vB5 Beta. We’ve identified a lot of areas for improvement and have made a lot of progress. We aren’t done yet, but here are a few things that you will see coming up.

Reduced query counts.

While we are primarily focusing on metrics around page load time and server load, one of the ways we are reducing those is by reducing unneeded queries. We’ve increase storing data locally to avoid pulling the same data multiple times in a single page load. We’ve also improved batching of queries to reduce the number of queries needed to pull similar records. You’ll see this most around fetching parsed bbcode from the cache and url generation. We’ve also improved external caching of data to avoid repeating expensive operations every page load. The most interesting work has been done around user permissions which are needed every page load and can be complicated to generate.

File System Cache

Originally we had two cache solutions: the DB cache which is intended as a lowest common denominator solution and memcache which a lot of people won’t have access to. We’ve introduced a filesystem cache now to split the difference. It only requires that you be able to write to the filesystem (if you have multiple webservers then all servers need to write to the same location – we recommend memcache when using multiple webservers) and it will remove the load on the database associated with DB caching.

JS and CSS

We’ve started to take a look at the javacript and CSS with an eye towards reducing the number of files and reducing the total size of code downloaded. This is still in the early stage so I don’t have a lot of information to share.

Templates on the Filesystem

We’ve started work on allowing servers to cache the compiled templates on the filesystem. This should not only reduce the load on the DB, but it will also allow us to use require instead of eval to process the templates. The advantage of that is opcode caches such as APC will be able to cache the parsed php code (which it can’t do with eval) providing some additional performance.

Bottom Line

In our internal testing we’ve seen substantial reduction in both Query counts and page load times (which is the metric we are focusing on). These changes will be out shortly on the vB Demo site and for download in the beta. We’ll continue to work on performance issues based on the data we get from the Demo site and feedback from the community.

Kevin
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cpvr, Oct 16, 2012

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Bundy Admin Talk Staff

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That was a nice little read. I may have to get my hands on a copy of vb5 now and start playing around..

Bundy, Oct 16, 2012

#4

Brandon Regular Member

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I think there will be a blog post in a few weeks explaining the reason for the URL changes and why it has to be done.

Brandon, Oct 16, 2012

#5

Bundy Admin Talk Staff

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Brandon said: ↑

I think there will be a blog post in a few weeks explaining the reason for the URL changes and why it has to be done.
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Why does it HAVE to be done? Hopefully they have plans to correct or redirect the urls? It would make sense thats for sure.

Bundy, Oct 16, 2012

#6

Brandon Regular Member

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KevinL said: ↑

Why does it HAVE to be done? Hopefully they have plans to correct or redirect the urls? It would make sense thats for sure.
Click to expand...

Yes they are redirected, everyone of them. In fact there is a table for them and I think that is one of the main concerns about the whole deal. Sites with 1,000,000+ post have been complaining.

Brandon, Oct 16, 2012

#7

Bundy Admin Talk Staff

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Brandon said: ↑

Yes they are redirected, everyone of them. In fact there is a table for them and I think that is one of the main concerns about the whole deal. Sites with 1,000,000+ post have been complaining.
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As they should be lol

Bundy, Oct 16, 2012

#8

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db-tech's thoughts on vbulletin 5 connect

Brandon Regular Member

Monster Admin Talk Staff

cpvr Regular Member

Bundy Admin Talk Staff

Brandon Regular Member

Bundy Admin Talk Staff

Brandon Regular Member

Bundy Admin Talk Staff

vBulletin 5 Connect Screenshots

vBulletin 5 Connect Beta 17 has been released

vBulletin 5 Connect Beta 21 has been released

vBulletin 5 Connect is Now Available

Review: vBulletin 5 Connect

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