Any plans for a CMS?

[gmaister22]

The reason i still haven't moved to xenForo is that you guys do not have an IP.Content replacement...

Are there any plans for it?

 

[TLMD]

I am pretty sure a CMS will come one day, but creating a good (!) CMS takes a lot of time and effort. We should not expect this being added to XF very soon. And a crappy CMS is nothing anybody wants to have...

 

[AlphaZealot]

Front page CMS is one of my top priorities for the rest of 2013 and in early 2014. I'd also like to be able to switch to 1.2 at some point in the fall as well without everything breaking, but that is a separate topic. CMS is vital for forums these days as Reddit and Facebook take away from the forum niche. Most forums don't offer a reason to elevate themselves above these mediums without content or a way to highlight user created content better than the aforementioned mediums (which isn't difficult)- I would hate to be trying to start a new forum in today's environment.

Any forum owner today who does not think a frontpage CMS is vital to their future over the next 5 years is wrong. In turn, if the service isn't offered from Xenforo, I'll look into others - and an unsupported third party add-on doesn't count as a service, it's a stop loss even if the quality is good.

IPB has been seeming very attractive on this front.

 

[Autonamus]

I don't get the whole CMS requirement that everyone talks about, is it really that vital?

None of my sites have ever had one in the last 5-6 years.

 

[TPerry]

I don't get the whole CMS requirement that everyone talks about, is it really that vital?

None of my sites have ever had one in the last 5-6 years.

Some folks want to compete against custom coded solutions (reddit, facebook, etc). They apparently want to make a swiss army knife out of a forum software.

 

[AlphaZealot]

Every forum and community is different. However, for most forums, discussions these days can more easily be moved to Facebook or even Reddit, so without content that is an actual value added, you will have a difficult time keeping new people around and also in attracting new people. Older people on forums are already invested in the forums existence, so count yourself lucky if you have a forum that has aged well. Right now, Xenforo doesn't highlight forum content very well, and the only way to have that problem solved is through a patchwork of add-ons that all require compatibility and bug fixing anytime a new version of Xenforo is released - not a very efficient or fun process.

I wouldn't call it a swiss army knife. I would call it a minimum expectation for a modern community website: a front page portal with CMS to highlight community content and a forum for the communities discussion. There are countless examples of this being executed and it is frustrating if the option is to rely on add-on's or bridges with wordpress. Frontpage portal/CMS will be a standard within two years for any adequate forum software - whoever gets their first and best will have a huge advantage, and I'm already letting people know how I wish my options were what IPB offered.

 

[TPerry]

I wouldn't call it a swiss army knife. I would call it a minimum expectation for a modern community website: a front page portal with CMS to highlight community content and a forum for the communities discussion. There are countless examples of this being executed and it is frustrating if the option is to rely on add-on's or bridges with wordpress. Frontpage portal/CMS will be a standard within two years for any adequate forum software - whoever gets their first and best will have a huge advantage, and I'm already letting people know how I wish my options were what IPB offered.

There is a world of difference between a portal and a CMS.
Eventually I'm sure you will see a CMS add-on developed by the developers of xenForo, but you have to realize that thanks to the lawsuit fiasco they lost a noticeable period of time in their coding window. Can't say as I really blame them on the lack of coding done with the fickleness of the courts and their decisions (just look at some of the ridiculous decisions coming out from the lawsuits between Google/Motorola, Samsung and Apple).

 

[jdj]

I am pretty sure a CMS will come one day, but creating a good (!) CMS takes a lot of time and effort. We should not expect this being added to XF very soon. And a crappy CMS is nothing anybody wants to have...

I presently use vBulletin 4, I have a current licence for vBulletin 5 and the only reason I haven't deployed vBulletin 5 is that it does not yet have a calendar or front page CMS - we use both. If xenforo had front page calendar and CMS I'd have bought it and moved over. However, if there'd been a good bridge between Xenforo and Joomla I would have looked at that as an alternative although I'd have wanted to convince myself before doing it that whatever I was moving to was 'mobile friendly.'

 

[jdj]

It's still valid. Although keep in mind that this company had to deal with a ~3 years lawsuit.

I agree, and that lawsuit didn't achieve anything for anybody.

At the end of the day though, if you're a forum software user you just have to go with whoever it is that's got what it is that you need to make your site a success.

Right now I need calendar, CMS, blogs. If there was a good bridge to Joomla I'd look at it because Joomla has CMS and blogs. Otherwise I wish Xenforo every success in producing whatever is being produced.

 

[Marcus]

I presently use vBulletin 4, I have a current licence for vBulletin 5 and the only reason I haven't deployed vBulletin 5 is that it does not yet have a calendar or front page CMS - we use both. If xenforo had front page calendar and CMS I'd have bought it and moved over. However, if there'd been a good bridge between Xenforo and Joomla I would have looked at that as an alternative although I'd have wanted to convince myself before doing it that whatever I was moving to was 'mobile friendly.'

May I ask you what you are using the calendar for? I tried the calendar on another forum software and it didn't really work out :/

 

[QenTox]

Me personally really would love to have a callendar, which will show the release dates of games / movies / books / (put here anything you want) in an easy way. Something like XenAtendo, but that is not really good for this purpose without modifying it.

 

[Marcus]

Me personally really would love to have a callendar, which will show the release dates of games / movies / books / (put here anything you want) in an easy way. Something like XenAtendo, but that is not really good for this purpose without modifying it.

You can use xenforos Information System to display alerts around the release.

 

[QenTox]

I am not sure what way it could replace a Calendar. I want to have a Calendar, that will be accessible all the time for all users, so they can check what is coming out (happening) next week (month, ...). And it would have release dates of games (movies, books, ...) date of game tournaments, basically any events related to your community. This can not be done with notices.

 

[Marcus]

I know. But notices are the only content type with date criteria so you should modify their behavior.

Imagine a small addon listing notices by day order. Voilà you have a flat view calendar.

 

[jdj]

May I ask you what you are using the calendar for? I tried the calendar on another forum software and it didn't really work out :/

We use it for CPD events (continuing professional development). It self-populates, the admins rarely have to touch this bit. It's mainly used by people who are trying to promote/sell their CPD events so they have an incentive to put them up. It doesn't matter to us, costs us nothing to have them make their contributions.

 

[Deepmartini]

Have you looked at Trumba.com calendar software? You can embed that on a page on your forum.