Not as long as you, I've been using IPB since 3.0.1
My current forum is IPB 3.1.4 I think?
These are my personal opinion based on 3.0-3.1. I have no experience with 3.2, things may have changed.
- I was first drawn to IPB for it's feature. I think I bought 5... board, blog, content, gallery .... can't quite remember what else.
- Right away, I found out I wasn't a big fan of their default 3.0-3.1 style. I shopped around but never really found anything that "clicks" for me. : /
(for reference, my IPB installation is
http://all-final.com/forum/ )
- As you can see, I found some based skin I think had potential, and modified it a LOT. I must say it wasn't a very pleasant experience doing so. After I was done, I seriously didn't want to touch the skinning ever again....
- But a lot of updates broke my skin. Tiny little things would move out of place I had to spend days figuring out what was going on, some features would simply stop working. So I had to dive back into skinning, and it was painful.
- IP.Content. My website staff wasn't able to get a hold of it. After 3 months of trying to get everyone involved creating content, they simply lost interest. My site's content was halt to a still. Until later I switched to some other free CMS which bumped up the productivity of my team a ton.
IP.Content had a lot of potential... Too bad it is so -not- intuitive. My members also wasn't too fond of IP.Blog. It's hard to skin and again the default layout is horrible, for my taste.
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OK now to Xenforo..... it's a big contrast. Because right away when I discovered this website, I loved the theme. Yes, the default theme. This is highly subjective so yours may differ
But being a picky ******* as I am, I once again cut Xenforo's skin to pieces. And guess what - I've skin phpBB, myBB, IPB... skinning Xenforo was simply the best experience I ever had. It was actually fun.
When Xenforo releases updates, I download them and install with my heart pounding. I hid in the corner of my room, click my mouse in fear my skin would fall apart. Twice I updated my forum, and both times only took me.... 5 minutes to fix my skin? Oh Em Gee.
I can't quite explain but , right now I feel like when I was a kid having new toys. I feel excited. Playing with Xenforo is fun. Working with Xenforo is fun. Learning to expand Xenforo's code is fun. Having my Xenforo up and running for my community is fun. Almost about every aspect of Xenforo is fun.
Damn, I want to stay home on weekends to play with Xenforo much more than going out with my girlfriend these days.