vbullentin vs xenforo

[admavrick]

Okay - so a couple of things. I'm building a forum for the industry I'm in where people would pay an up front cost to join.

How easy is it to set up a upfront payment subsciption when you connect it with amember? I am struggling at the moment trying to set up vbullentin and its impossible to get a clear answer from that group.

Also as far as styling what can - and can you not do with Xenforo? Overall I like the look of it, but lets say I want to style and really customize it. Can I do that?

 

[TimFL]

Can‘t really speak for 1) but the styling is very straight forward, took us a minute to figure it out:
- You have an easy to use style properties system where you can set certain design cues and alter the coloring of your theme
- The template system allows you to „mod“ your forum (edit the html, essentially)
—> The extra.less template allows you to add custom css to your forum

I‘m sure there is more but these 3 points allowed us to add and change loads of things on our forum. You can also look at the resource manager on this site and check out submitted styles to see what‘s possible with a bit of knowledge and patience.

We came from vBulletin (4 and 5) and don‘t regret the switch, although xF in it‘s current iteration is a bit barebones compared to vB (no social groups, no events/calendar, no blog etc.) which is good IMHO because it focuses on the essentials (and is really good at that), the other stuff can be added ontop via resources or by doing it yourself.

 

[TPerry]

aMember is not directly supported by XenForo. To allow direct integration will most likely require some custom development or a add-on supported by aMember. From looking at the aMember site, it does appear that their is an integration ability that they have, but I'm pretty sure it's for the 1.x line and not the current 2.x line. The add-on that they have may not be coded by them and may be a third party add-on.
http://www.amember.com/docs/How_It_Works#Integration_Plugins

 

[Paul B]

The integration aMember has done has not been done correctly and there are issues with user groups and permissions.

Unless it has changed since the last ticket we had related to it, I wouldn't recommend using it in conjunction with XF.