New Customer Questions
 

I have a few questions from the perspective of a new customer...I have taken the time to read the FAQ and license/pricing information and feel I understand that.

We're planning to move to vBulletin as part of a complete redesign/overhaul of our flying club site- which is currently PostNuke+PNphpBB2. Immediately prior to your 4.0 announcement we had largely settled on Vivvo+vBulletin. Our timetable is to start moving the site immediately in terms of test and development* later with visual layout and customization* with a goal to have the "new" site up some time in Q1 of 2010* ideally January* in practice anything by end of February would be fine. We also have the advantage of being a mostly "closed" site and a membership that is aware of and tolerant of post-rollout visual and functinal polishing. We're not a large site in terms of active users (300-400) or posts (8k-9k per year) but still have the usual pains of data migration to work through especially as we have several data areas (photo gallery* calendars* document library) that are sort of 1-offs and don't have good even starting points into mapping to anything new.

When we saw the original announcement on 4.0 we were willing to move forward with vBulletin 4.0 CMS - but now the one comment I've seen on a GA date is Q2 2010 which is very different then the impression left by the pre-sales announcement.

So* the question is...

What sort of opportunity to have access to the software (beta* gamma* rc* preview* call it anything) for development will be given for current paid customers (which we will be this week for the forums at least regardless)? It wouldn't have to be immediately* but sooner rather than later but after at least database schema has largely gelled (less worried about themes and visual until later). The issue is we're a volunteer effort - skilled* but things take time. We're well aware of the rough edges in early software and the team of volunteers is all experienced in this arena and willing to be patient. We would love to have a single integrated platform - but if we can't start development until Q2 and then deploy after that we are probably going to have to go with our original choice to make our commitment to our users for an updated site in time for flying season next Spring and given the site life cycle of a small organization like ours aren't likely to switch again any time soon if the "new" site infrastructure stays well supported (the issue that is forcing us to switch this time).

Regardless we'll be ordering under the current promo this month and spending the extra $40 to hedge our bets - but if the answer is we can't get access to the 4.0 software until Q2 2010 we'll have to go with our original plans and do only the forums portion of the new site with vBulletin and use something/someone else for the CMS.