Upgrading Vbulletin 3.* to Vbulletin 4.*

Vbulletin 4 was released a couple of months ago and comes with a number of new features. It also comes in two flavours:

• Forum only
• Forum + CMS

A number of the forums I run / manage / catherd are still running Vbulletin 3.* and I wasn’t in too much of a hurry to upgrade until I was sure that Vbulletin 4 was stable (ie. they’d found the big nasty bugs). The other thing that I had to factor in was third party software, such as VBSeo.

Since both VBSeo and Vbulletin seemed to be “ok” I decided to try the upgrade today. In this instance I wasn’t adding the CMS, so the upgrade was simply vbulletin 3.* to vbulletin 4.*
(If you want to see a site with the full CMS suite installed try this one)

Unfortunately the documentation provided by Vbulletin isn’t exactly stellar, but you will find better details and tips if you look on their forums.

Key points:

• make a backup. If it goes terribly wrong you can always revert back to what you had previously ie. something that actually worked
• Disable ALL plugins.
• DO NOT run “install.php” – you’re doing an upgrade not an install. You simply need to run “upgrade.php”
• Vbulletin 3.* templates are not compatible with Vbulletin 4.* – the code has changed a LOT, so you will need to do a vbulletin 4 version of your site’s theme if you have one

If, like me, you forgot to disable the plugins before running the upgrade you can end up with what looks like a totally unusable and completely useless Vbulletin install.
There is, however, a way to save yourself.
Edit config.php and add the following line just below the opening php tag add the following line:

define(‘DISABLE_HOOKS’, true);

That basically disables all the plugins and mods, so you can then go in to your Vbulletin control panel and disable them all.

Some of the more popular mods for Vbulletin 3 have been ported to Vbulletin 4, though I suspect it will take a few more months before the coders get round to providing versions of all the more popular mods.. In many ways it’s a good thing, as this forced me to disable a lot of the modifications and addons that had made their way into the site over the last couple of years. Hopefully the functionality won’t be too adversely affected!