VBulletin 3.5 - Customisation Made Easy

Although some people are content to deal with phpbb and other solutions, apart from a one minor hiccup (of my own creation) I've always found vBulletin to be worth the licensing fee. The 3.5 series brings a new set of tools for hacking and customising your forum with ease. Although a lot of simple changes to the way forums display and, more importantly, how they display it, can be done by editing a few files the latest version of vBulletin allows you to install plugins directly from within the admin control panel. I upgraded one forum I manage to the latest version last night and was able to install two powerful hacks in less than 5 minutes (it took me longer to find the hacks I wanted!). If you want search engine friendly URLs then DC Seo vB URL Rewrite provides a simple and effective solution. One small XML file and a .htaccess and you are done! Very impressive and a lot more effective than the manual hacks available for phpbb. I'll definitely be looking into installing this and other hacks on the company forums I can see myself spending quite a few evenings digging through vBulletin.org over the coming weeks and months :)