What to expect?

More eye-candy, a more stable forum software and long time bugs being fixed is what I'd bet my money on. Of course a better way to manage code snippets and blogs would be a nice to have thing. :-)

Also, since Daniweb uses vBulletin, you can read about the features of the latest vBulletin here.

Not really any more eye candy ... at least for now, the site will have the same look and feel. This upgrade is much more behind the scenes ... the biggest changes will be more stability and long time bugs finally being fixed, as sos said.

The biggest additional feature would be the ability to tag forum threads (tag clouds, etc), a feature that's already available in our blogs, but with a cool AJAX-ey twist ... and this time it's native vBulletin.

This part of the upgrade is already complete, having taken the better part of the past month for me to do. It would have gotten done much quicker, but I came down with a bad summer cold. The entire DaniWeb forum system is now working on the new codebase ... all hacks and all. I'd show you screenshots, but it really does look exactly the same. It is very different under the hood though, as we've made the massive leap from vBulletin 3.6.0 to vBulletin 3.8.4. (For those of you non-vB experts out there, that is just over two years of versions).

What's left is, as sos mentioned, the blogs and code snippets. While the current plan is for them to look and function the same to the end user, the actual entries themselves are going to be migrated out of my custom-coded solution and into the forum system. This way, they'll be as feature rich as the forum threads, and moderators will have as much flexibility with them as they currently do with forum threads. (This will make them much easier to manage!) This also means instant access to things like inline images for bloggers and attachments for the code snippets.

From a coding standpoint, it will also mean I won't have to constantly reinvent the wheel, coding features into them that are already available in vBulletin. It will also mean a much easier upgrade path in the future since only the frontend will be changed, and the backend will remain default vBulletin. While our new office and growing business does allow me to hire a programmer, and eventually (hopefully) a small team, that is still a little ways away in the future. For now, being the only developer, I was anxiously looking for the best solution for something I could handle and maintain by myself, and custom-coded solutions written and manned by one person aren't really the most conducive to that.

w0w you upgraded the codebase from 3.6 to 3.8.4 that quickly??

Poor girl,your probably tired out!!

Site loads good :)

Good luck Dani!!!