Quote Originally Posted by WILL
Hey guys, I just wanted to give everyone a little update on the status of this little project to help improve PGD. The decision to move to vBulletin from the existing SMF site software was made sometime early this year
The new key features will be:
- News Posting for Staff and Members alike;
I don't see how you can NOT do that in SMF...

- The same good ole Forums we know and love; and
- Staff and Member Blogs available here at PGD. Wanted to start one, well here is a place to do it.
Same here. I've been offering blogs for users (with admin panel and stuff) at http://noisen.com for the last 3 years. It's using custom code, but I'm working on a mod for doing that, and there are already plenty of blog mods for SMF.

I'm sorry, it's just that I don't understand your reason for moving to another forum software, paid-for at that, instead of trying out SMF2, which is stable enough in my opinion. (I've been using it ever since I opened noisen.com)
I could understand a move to IPB, which is relatively nice, or the free PunBB, which is faster on slow servers (and yours looks like it's a very slow server, or at least a slow connection to France).

Interestingly, I spent some time at SMF developing the software (so I have knowledge in both SMF and Pascal game development), and I can tell you that SMF is to forum software what Delphi is to programming, whereas vBulletin would, fittingly, be Visual Basic (it started out as a forum for VB devs), IPB would be C++ and phpBB would be Fortran.
I'm now working on a side-project that should hopefully get SMF up to speed in terms of feature set (compared to the commercial competition) on the day SMF2 gets out. Consider it a super-mod that implements everything that should be in a modern forum system -- for free.

Just my two cents. Don't switch until you've at least tried SMF2 RC3 (or the upcoming final RC.)