Website Integration Class?

3dfx

New member
I'm deciding between vB and xF right now. vB is a damn legacy at this point, which means it has tons of addon and modification support, however xF comes with many of these addons out of the box, and seems to be going in a better direction.

However before I purchase I must know if there is a class or proper documentation on complete website integration. Searching has yielded some random user submitted code and while that may work it's not officially supported.

~ I'm not interested in downloaded 34,000 different scripts / frameworks to get this running. If it doesn't play well with others out of the box, it's not for me.

~ A little effort from my part is completely acceptable. Though if ALL effort is on my part then there's absolutely no reason to pay.

~ How is skinning with xF?

~ Not interested in a fanboy debate over vB and xF, I'll buy whichever one suits my needs best. Screw IPB.

Thanks guys, hopefully we can make a transaction soon.
 
Looking for people who have already done the legwork. I want to use xF's database and session handling outside of the forum. Things such as:

Say my forum is located at domain.tld/forum, and my front page is located at domain.tld/index.php, I'm looking to implement the following features (provided via the forum script) to my core site:

~ Login / Logout
~ Topic Pulling
~ User Information Pulling (Name, Avatar, Status, etc...)

Similar to SimpleMachines' SSI.php (if you're familiar)

I understand with any script it's possible, if you feel like putting in the leg work. However, I find myself short of free time these days, and this would be one extra step I'd have to perform in setting up my project.
 
complete website integration.
Neither Xenforo or vBulletin "eat their own dog food".
Neither company's website landing page uses their own software ! Shameful really.
About 6 years ago vBulletin should have been smart and adopted Logician's WebTemplates as a rudimentary CMS, instead they released a horrible articles script 5 years later, called it vBCMS, and it still sucks to this day.

~ Login / Logout
~ Topic Pulling
~ User Information Pulling (Name, Avatar, Status, etc...)

Would XenPorta's Landing Page be enough for this ? example: 8wayrun.com

If you gave very specific details of what "Non-Forum content" you wanted, I could give more specific solution information. For you, I'm thinking Wordpress + Xenforo.

Good Luck.
FWIW, you are a brave person to even consider vB4. vB is run by a corporate beast called IB that is darn near killing vBulletin.
 
I wasn't aware that no subscription based forum software offered website integration. Shouldn't this be the first thing you do as a community software developer? I didn't realize that the paid forum software market was just reinventing the wheel every few years. I figured it would come with all the implementation systems, hooks, and API functions that free options lack.

I suppose if my community grew into the six digits and I needed every bit of efficiency I could get, I might look into a paid script (if indeed they are better in that regard -- guess I'd have to check the numbers), but for now it's quite apparent that the open source community is where I need to be.

I sincerely apologize for wasting your time.
 
My research has been over for a few months now, please look into SMF's SSI.php if you're curious about what I'm looking for, but obviously with more streamlined code, better efficiency, and less pain in the ass. Hence why I started checking out paid scripts, assuming they must offer the same features as free scripts and much more.

Edit: Doctor, I don't expect you to go do research on SMF's SSI just to answer my questions, I'm already convinced vB, xF, or IPB are not what I'm looking for. That was mainly for googler's or people with similar questions.

Also, thanks for your replies and time.
 
It does indeed, but it's a 3rd party script which someone spent a lot of time working on. A script which I would rip to shreds and dissect to fit my needs, the same thing I would do with any other forum script out there. So why drop 140 bucks? I'm afraid I just don't see the reasoning unless I had an extremely large community, which I do not.
 
Rendering XenForo templates and generally using XenForo stuff as you described outside XenForo is surprisingly straight forward. With pretty much every other forum system it is a nightmare task.

That being said, there is no publicly available easy solution. You have to really know what you are doing.

As a starting point mess around with the files from Kotomi along with the Tapatalk plugin bridge class, and generally big chunks of the Tapatalk plugin. You might get away with something close to a copy+paste job :)
 
Yes, I understand that. I've done it for years with free forum software, which hasn't been supported since the developers of xF were over at Jelsoft. I'm in the market for a new script.

phpBB and SMF both make using their stuff outside of the forum directory a few lines of code easy. Unfortunately I have had horrible experiences with both of them and my community is certainly not interested in migrating to them. In fact most of them want vB, because that's what they've come to know. I had my eyes more on xF because it looks like they're actually listening to the community this time. But if I have to purchase the script, then spend a month ripping it apart and integrating it before I can even use it, I'd rather just go to another free script. I'm perfectly fine with a reasonable amount of work, developers can't tailor everything to me, but if there's literally no documentation and it's a trial and error case, no thank you. I've been down that road, and no way in hell I'm paying anyone to go down it again.

What do you mean by straight forward? Do you have a link to some code examples I can look at? Google results seem to only return people with the same question I have, or nothing at all. Perhaps I'm using the wrong query.
 
What do you mean by straight forward? Do you have a link to some code examples I can look at? Google results seem to only return people with the same question I have, or nothing at all. Perhaps I'm using the wrong query.

As a starting point mess around with the files from Kotomi along with the Tapatalk plugin bridge class, and generally big chunks of the Tapatalk plugin. You might get away with something close to a copy+paste job :)

Everything you need has probably already been done in the Tapatalk and/or Forumrunner plugins :)
 
Rendering XenForo templates and generally using XenForo stuff as you described outside XenForo is surprisingly straight forward. With pretty much every other forum system it is a nightmare task.

Darkimmortal: How about making one ?

As a starting point mess around with the files from Kotomi along with the Tapatalk plugin bridge class, and generally big chunks of the Tapatalk plugin. You might get away with something close to a copy+paste job :)
Oh yeah ... Kotomi !

I also forgot about this resource:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/how-i-created-my-external-pages.14332/
example: http://www.seahawkshuddle.com/
 
I do think that currently there is a lack of documentation/support in the website integration side of things (xenforo development in general tbh). Certainly with what I would call proper website integration (integrating the forums with a website in it's own right rather than just tacking some pages onto the forums). Obviously it's still early days for the software at the moment and I guess that's why there's nothing around at the moment. But I do think it needs to be a priority going forward as one of the things that made vbulletin so popular was the addons and anything that helps developers create those addons/integrations will help give the software a wider audience.

I've been sharing my own integration experiences so far in the Development Discussion forum but there doesn't seem to be a great deal of people trying to do the same thing. I've had quite a few headaches getting as far as I have so far (maintaining session, logging in/out, linking to parts of the forum etc). For the logging in/out I just basically replicated Xenforo's own login/logout functions (though it's not yet working 100% - can't login without remember me being ticked).

It would be good if the obvious stuff (as above, data writing, showing posts/threads etc) was documented as it would make things a lot easier. And I do think there should be an effort to provide support for those looking to do this type of integration.
 
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