Hi everybody, it's been a tremendous week for XFtoWP and I love to see how new sites are using the plugin to create a strong bond between WordPress and XenForo. I'm now putting together a showcase page to start showing off your work and I will be reaching out to all license holders soon for permission to use your site(s) here.
If you know you'd be interested in featuring your site on XFtoWP.com just message me your site URL(s) and a brief description of how you're using the features and I'll include you. First come first serve.
Here's the news items from the week:
License renewals now 40% off
Can you believe it's already been over a year? I don't know who's been paying attention but I sure have and I can say that the best is still yet to come! To keep this ambitious plugin's development and support going strong the business model has been a simple discounted yearly renewal model and I think the value has been there so far.
For the first year this plugin was advertised at 25% off license renewals but after crunching numbers from over the year I realized the renewal fee was still too high despite the massive additions to the plugin from November 2020 to now.
That's why some weeks ago I quietly changed the renewal discount to 40% off which is a more fair price considering you probably have other licensed products you have to renew every year too, including your XF license. I think this is fair for both sides, especially if you use XFtoWP to enhance your eCommerce process like more and more sites are.
You can
renew your XFtoWP license from your account area with the discount automatically applied. Don't worry, if you've already renewed your license key you've already paid this discounted rate.
In case you missed it: the official BuddyPress integration is now available in XFtoWP 1.4.1
Earlier this week
BuddyPress (and by extension, BuddyBoss) was added to XFtoWP's official integrations list and released without a hitch. Amongst many other things on the todo list, there are more integrations in the works including a couple of LMS ones I am working with some customers on that will be added to the official integrations list:
For every other use case, there's custom development...
I know you've heard those famous words around here before and this week some outstanding use cases for what can be done under the hood have launched and really show the potential of what the power of XenForo can look like in WordPress.
1. Turn the forum registration process into a conversation with Fluent Forms
I had never heard of the
Fluent Forms plugin before, but an XFtoWP customer wanted to use it to create an "application style" registration form that walks user's through a series of questions and creates a new forum profile based on their answers. Thanks to the robust
developer docs from the Fluent Forms website, we found the right hook needed to insert an XF API call after the form is submitted to process and create the user without ever having to visit XF.
I'll release this code soon as it doesn't quite fit the same standards of an official integration but this code highlights exactly how to fire API requests to XenForo in pretty much any situation.
2. Grow your email list and forum registrations in one simple form
What if you want to attach forum registrations to your lead magnet or email newsletter signup form? By combining the built-in email service integrations (think: MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, AWeber, etc.) from the
Marketers Delight WordPress theme and XFtoWP we may have created the simplest forum registration... ever.
Once submitted, the subscriber will get the next step instructions delivered to their inbox, including a page to set their password to their already registered forum account. In this particular integration we opted not to ask for a password at this stage under the principle that less is more when it comes to conversion rates. We will see if this minimalism pays off with actual forum engagement over time.
3. Importing thousands of comment articles from an old vBulletin integration to XFtoWP
From the official XFtoWP support forums I helped solve the case of a user who wanted to import thousands of articles using an old vBulletin to WordPress connector plugin into a data format that XFtoWP can understand. Thanks to their prior success of retaining the same thread IDs during the vB-to-xF conversion and for the old vB connector plugin to save those thread IDs to the postmeta of each WP post, this seemingly massive import job was solved in a support forum thread and a fairly simple function!
Read the thread yourself for the gruesome details.
Looking ahead to XFtoWP 1.5
Thanks to your feedback about XFtoWP's user syncing capabilities we are nearing the beta stage for XFtoWP 1.5 which includes some powerful new user syncing tools. There is still at least one minor point release in the 1.4.x series planned before we get there, but these tools are the biggest development priority for this plugin.
Follow the
XFtoWP forums for all new release information, and be sure to submit your own feedback about what you need from XF-WP user syncing to make sure you'll be covered.
Thank you to everyone who supports this product and I look forward to showing you what's next.
- Alex
REMINDER: Want to be featured in the upcoming
XFtoWP.com site showcase? Send me a message with your site URL(s) and a brief description of how you're using the plugin and I'll include you. First come first serve.