The8thLegion.com

This is the first site I ever made. http://www.the8thlegion.com/

It created it with vBulletin 4 in August 2010. I converted to Xenforo on October 2011.

The 8th Legion is a general chat and media law and entertainment forum. I will be writing tutorials to teach people how to copyright their work whether it be photos, music, books etc. I already post news and articles about copyright law etc but I still need tutorials. I use both Wordpress integration and XenPorta due to it's tight integration with the rest of the forum's modifications.

I switched to Xenforo because there is no official wordpress bridge for vB4. I was using a vB3 wordpress bridge. The guy who created the bridge hated vb4 so much that he banned from me his site when I asked for vb4 support. I did the best I could with the bridge. I even got avatars to work in the vb4 version. Later on I learned that Wordpress integration for Xenforo is supported on www.xenscripts.com

In wordpress / xenforo integration, members can reply to wordpress articles with their xenforo account but the added plus is that article creates a thread on the forums as well and your comments that show up in the wordpress article also show up in the forum thread that is attached to the article. If you post in the forum thread it will show in the wordpress article and visa versa. I use xenporta instead of wordpress as the main site due to the fact that I can easily integrate and configure more modules to the home page and it wasn't hard setting up a slider at all.

Some addons I use on The 8th Legion:

Xenscripts Wordpress Bridge $40 Doesn't work with WP 3.3.1 Used w/ XenDynamic
Social Groups $40
Post Ratings $30
Ad Management $30
Donation Manager 30
Arrowchat = $20 for yearly updates.
XFArcade $20 (That's not the price, you have to donate)
Ragtek XF Addons $10 membership
Edit History $10
Library
UserAlbums
LN Blog
Taigachat
Xenporta
XenMedio
XenCarta
XenUtiles
XenAtendo
And many more.

Skins
I've created all my skins with the exception of the mobile theme from XFStop.

I had photopost and arrowchat on my old vB4 forum. I added arrowchat to my xenforo forum and moved both photopost and vbulletin albums over to XFR UserAlbums. Converting the site over from vB4 to XF was easy at first then became difficult as I went on because I was using mod-rewrite urls for the vB4 forum and my xenforo was in another directory. I also had Wordpress integrated with vbulletin on the site root as well. You have to have them in the same directory to integrate with each other but in Xenforo, you don't have to.

I used these threads to upgrade:

vBulletin 4 Importer
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/vbulletin-4-importer.5726/

Use Import Redirection
http://xenforo.com/help/import-redirection/

With vBulletin 4 Redirection Scripts
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/vbulletin-4-x-url-redirection.7584/

When I got stuck with redirection, Jake helped me out. He's pretty awesome.

To upgrade, I imported vb4.1.7 to XF 1.04 then upgraded to XF 1.1.04 Beta after the import was done. The blogs did not make the import due to a bug in the vb4 Importer. I had to manually add each blog and comment unfortunately. I lost attachments. Avatars, Albums, Social Groups and Images made it just fine though. I lost a subforum that had a couple threads in it. Pretty annoyed about that but it's no big deal. I also lost 8 members. All the losses came when I had to do another import after the first import got stuck on the blogs bug.

My XF site is 30% faster than it was back when it was on vB4. I'm really amazed.

Now that´s a properly done introduction to how & what has been done to your Xenforo installation, thanks for this.

Thank you very much! I think Xenforo is awesome and more people should convert over. The more people who use Xenforo, the quicker Kier and them will get on to adding Twitter Integration like IPB? lol I don't know, just saying...

I think my favorite aspect of converting over from vBulletin4 to Xenforo is my site had a webpage test of 88 and now it is 95. That's really awesome to me. I don't know if the site will maintain that speed once I start adding Google Adsense though. It's a shame how Google will penalize a site's ranking due to speed when their own ads slow down sites.

Hi The8thLegion, it seems we are trying to make almost the same thing.

I will really appreciate your advice in this thread.

Thanks.

Okay cool I replied to your post here: Move to Xenforo

But more importantly, read about how much my members love the new software

How Do You Like The New Site So Far?
http://www.the8thlegion.com/threads/how-do-you-like-the-new-site-so-far.4845/

Is The Forum Faster?
http://www.the8thlegion.com/threads/is-the-forum-faster-now.4693/

Runs Better On Chrome
http://www.the8thlegion.com/threads/does-this-site-runs-better-on-chrome.4751/

Random but here are some Wordpress Plugins I used when I had wordpress integration enabled.

Comments With Avatars
http://www.sterling-adventures.co.uk/blog/2009/01/01/comments-with-avatars/

Secure Wordpress
http://www.websitedefender.com/secure-wordpress-plugin/

Special Recent Posts
http://www.lucagrandicelli.com/special-recent-posts-plugin-for-wordpress/

Post Views/ Post Rating / Page Navi
http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

WP Cumulus
http://www.roytanck.com/2008/03/15/wp-cumulus-released/

Reveal IDS
http://www.schloebe.de/wordpress/reveal-ids-for-wp-admin-25-plugin/

Custom Post Templates
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-post-template/

Google XML Sitemaps
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/

Inline Posts
http://aralbalkan.com/wordpress/

Don't forget to google Yoasts SEO.

Thanks for sharing

What did you do to set up your multiple rss feeds? I'd like to convert them all to feedburner. I'm wondering if this addon will do it or if I should do it some other way: http://xenforo.com/community/threads/global-rss-xml-feed.7856/#post-109547. Do you have any tips or experience with anything like this?

Thanks for taking the time to show me this. This is a very nice feature!

The8thLegion,

How did you do the photo slider (the part that now reads, The Woman in Black, Chronical, The New Arcade, etc.).? I have something like this on my current vB site. Would love to know how to do this on XF.

It's done with XenPorta's RecentSlider block

Another thing I'd like to mention is that when I first created my Xenforo forum, it was in a folder called forum.

To keep links from being broken after moving the xenforum forum to the root, I had to empty the forum folder and leave an .htaccess redirect file. Unfortunately, the directory name 'forum' clashed with the Xenporta modification since xenporta redirects visitors to 'forum' whenever you make the portal your home page. To fix this, I changed the name in xenporta from 'forum' to 'board'.

Jake Bunce helped me out with the .htaccess redirect and XFacil.com helped me out with renaming the forum home.

I like the looks of both your forums -- very stylish

With Pink Candy skin
http://www.the8thlegion.com/board/
the subnav bar is really hard to read.

I fixed it.

You have done a nice work with the theme. They look very sharp on both, the front page and the forum. The portal page looks very professional. And the forum contents from what I saw while doing a quick browse through seemed interesting. Well done.

Thank you very much for the compliment! Sorry I'm just now seeing this post. Yeah there's some weird forum contents that pop out at you every now and then lol.

Hi Legion,

I want to ask about your following quote:

So to clarify, when I post on my Wordpress blog it will create a thread on the forum automatically and comments on my blog will appear on the forum and vice-versa?

And, you mentioned this:

Xenscripts WP Bridge doesn't work with 3.3.1 (which I have) or do you mean it doesn't work with XenDynamic WITH 3.3.1?

Also, your 'Social Groups' link in your first post is dead. What do you use for this?

Thanks for your time.

Ken