Since the release of vBulletin 4.0 a few weeks ago, one of the downsides to upgrading is that very few premium themes have been updated to work, leaving many forum owners stuck with using the default theme. For those not into tweaking their own designs the new template system can present a daunting task.

Here’s 22 fresh, clean and simple vBulletin 4.0 themes that, if nothing else, will get your VB4 upgrade a choice of colors and styles. Most can be found at vbulletin.org but I felt these were the ones best suited for use on a board right now. Again, while nothing overly fancy, any should be a good starting point or nice diversion from the default theme.

Default V2 – Simple Blue

Reaxtion Studios – Elegant Gray

Christmas Style

VB 4 Sky style

K2 Feeling Xmas

V-vb4 Style Vbulletin4 By eTiKeT

Vista on vb4

Alternatives (Rouge Et Noire)

Rainbow Skin

BlueHaze

BP-Brown

Little Black – vBpixel

Green Island

SimpleBlack

vBFans.com CleanCut Style

DarkChrome vBulletin 4 Style

SpeedMotiv Theme!

Happy New Year 2010

Darkness vB4

DarkVision

Desert Warfare

BlueTeck vB4 Gold

I mentioned back in a post about the release of vBulletin 4.0 that it was a different animal and I didn’t expect to be migrating anytime soon. So much for famous last words, after having spent the better part of last week upgrading my Carrie Underwood forums to vBulletin 4.

I did get one thing right in that post, VB4 is definitely a different animal and after working with it on the dev board the default theme has grown on me. It’s simple and after 5 years of messing with forums, I’ve come to the real conclusion that splash does nothing but get in the way when things get busy.

If you’ve been using VB4 them you’ll be happy to know that the forum part of the software is still rock solid as ever. There’s a few things that have been changed or removed with the new templates but most seem to be oversights and simple plugins or template mods have been released to address those issues.

One of the big pluses I found is the theme editor has some incredible potential. If you’re big into creating or manipulating your own themes then it’ll take a bit of getting used to, but I was able to do the conversion with a minimal amount of template edits which should make upgrades a good bit smoother.

The upgrade process was really smooth. I jumped from VB 3.8.1 and it went as smooth as upgrades typically do.

The major stumbling block with the forum portion of the new software is the lack of available themes. vBulletin.org has a bunch of simplistic themes that are VB4 ready, but most of them are the typical gaudy things you’d expect (honestly I’m not sure why some people think a fire engine red forum, with a red background and orange fonts looks good).

If you’re waiting for your favorite premium theme to be converted and made 4.0 ready, plan to wait a while. From what I can tell with the ones I’ve used in the past, the developers are trying to stay with the tableless concept and I think that’s going to be a futile effort for some of them. Some themes out there just have to have tables in order to function properly across all browsers and while it’s great to not have to use them, does it really matter? Probably not. So my expectation is a few will get converted to tableless version but in the end most themers will simply convert their existing skins to work with the new templating system.

Feature wise, not a great deal has changed. There’s some advancements like the ability to embed video without the need for a plugin now, but the calendar still isn’t integrated into the forums. The new class structures also means major changes for plugin developers. Very few, if any existing plugins will work in VB4 and while a fair amount have been converted, I suspect that most are either still struggling grasping the new methods or just not bothering to. So if you’re planning to upgrade, you have to consider what plugins you have, which of those have been converted and which haven’t (and may not be).

Overall though, I am pleased with forum product. I have the CMS and blogs turned off at the moment but I hope to play with them a bit this week. The reviews in that area are all over the board so I’ll just to test it and see if it’ll do things I’d like to see it do.

Incidentally, vBulletin announced they are planning a scheduled release of VB 4.0.1 sometime later today. Hopefully this will address some of the little things that I had to chase down or that got left out. We’ll see.

Well this is news. I got an email from the vBulletin team announcing the official release of the vBulletin 4.x series.

The vBulletin team is very excited to announce the availability of vBulletin 4.0 Gold. The release includes vBulletin 4.0 Forums and the all-new vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite. As of this week, these are officially supported products that are eligible for both ticket support and phone support.

The 4.0 Gold release is the result of huge investments in development resources, rigorous new development and testing procedures, and unprecedented levels of customer input throughout the development process. We’re very grateful for the continued support and passion the vBulletin community has displayed throughout the development process.

Customers can download vBulletin 4.0 from the customer area at http://members.vbulletin.com.

I’ve been playing around with the recent release candidate. It’s ok and is a major change in the development. Some plugins seem to still work, a bunch don’t and none of the templates are compatible. The new template management system has also been redesigned and well, let’s just say it’s quite the different animal. I haven’t used it enough yet to really form an opinion. Everybody can gripe about change and this certainly qualifies so we’ll see.

The forum product looks very promising, as expected, however the CMS suite…. not so much. again, haven’t played with it enough but so far I’m not seeing enough there to convince me to move from a WordPress/vBulletin implementation to the new one, feature wise anyway so there again, we’ll see how it develops.

Should you upgrade? That depends. I haven’t touched either one of my main forums with it yet and don’t really plan to anytime soon. Mainly because I don’t want to use the default theme and I don’t have time to architect a new one at the moment but if you’re game for new and exciting things, then this one is for you.

If you’ve upgraded to 4.0 already, let us know how it went, what you think of it and any problems you might have had.