What this means for you as a current vBulletin customer is that your current license will continue on until it expires, then, you will be able to purchase an owned license without ever having to do so again.

There’s more good news: the dreadful periwinkle & purple home page of vBulletin.com finally looks like a real website from the 21st century. It gives an overview of the two new packages:

• vBulletin 4.0 Forum: Praise the Lord, vBulletin now has SEO capabilities that include search engine friendly URLs (welcome to 2004!), custom meta data for posts, search engine compliant XML sitemaps, anti duplicate content capabilities, a user interface that has been completely redesigned, a management system for media such as photos, and an improved search function.
• vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite: It has everything listed above from the classic forum, plus of the new CMS’s bells and whistles; namely with blog and article publishing features, new templating features, a custom widget feature (recent articles, users, friends, posts, blogs, section-specific feeds, polls), along with all of the customization and micro-management admin features that all of us obsessive-compulsive webmasters desire.

All I can say is that I’m really excited about this new release of vBulletin…it has inspired me to revisit some of my old forum-only website ideas. Keep in mind, this is no longer just a forum with some cheap little social networking feature anymore — it’s a full-fledged competitor in the CMS market with the security and features you knew and loved of its predecessor.

If you’re wondering what the new vBulletin looks like – feast your eyes on these freakin’ sweet screenies.

Preliminary pricing for vBulletin’s two 4.0 releases ends on Friday, October 30, 2009. Be sure to jump in to save $50 per license on vBulletin CMS Publishing Suite. I’d chalk this CMS up as a “low-to-mid-priced” one, as its regular price is in the ballpark of $285 when not on sale.