Nulumia
Well-known member
So I'm looking for some thoughts and opinions from site admins or developers, and what you think of platforms like Xenforo vs Wordpress.
We want to create a gaming league/tournament community that is Playstation-focused, with team memberships, contests, season tournaments and fun challenges. We want people to form teams, view team listings, and sign up for ladders and other events. That in addition to blogs and reviews etc.
I've worked in Wordpress for ages but for some reason I've always preferred going with a different platform whenever the requirements make sense or allow for it. On one hand, Wordpress powers some ridiculous percentage of the web right now (I forget the estimate), and as they say "there's always a plugin available for what you want to do." Especially for community building, there's a pretty impressive catalog of commercial community plugins on the market that can achieve anything you can imagine.
However, Wordpress has always been to me a case where the farther you want to take it, and the more advanced the requirements for your site, the more bloated and buggy of a mess it becomes. I love the extensibility of the booming plugin market, however I dislike how fragmented and spotty it can be at times. You're site may end up depending on some obscure plugin that the author may simply abandon out of thin air.
Granted this can be the case at times with any platform, but numerous times I've been involved with building a large WP site that ended up being a delicate balance of plugins all modified to try to work together, and the nightmare trying to maintain it.
We just looked into (won't mention name) one of the best darn looking all-in-one WP gaming themes on the market, which literally packaged in every feature on our requirements list. But on closer look at reviews and comments, my thoughts on Wordpress mentioned above started to show through.
That's why we're considering going with Xenforo, which is one of the most compact, lean and optimized platforms I've ever worked with. While WP might be a more extensible CMS that can have forums added, Xenforo is a powerful and STABLE forum that can have other things added. I guess that's the dilemma with our choice.
Currently we're weighing (for the Xen option) using some of these:
- [XFA] Tournament
- [XFA] Roster
- Nobita Social Groups
- Form/application plugins, etc
I'd love to hear any thoughts or opinions you may have on working in Xen vs Wordpress!
Thanks for reading.
We want to create a gaming league/tournament community that is Playstation-focused, with team memberships, contests, season tournaments and fun challenges. We want people to form teams, view team listings, and sign up for ladders and other events. That in addition to blogs and reviews etc.
I've worked in Wordpress for ages but for some reason I've always preferred going with a different platform whenever the requirements make sense or allow for it. On one hand, Wordpress powers some ridiculous percentage of the web right now (I forget the estimate), and as they say "there's always a plugin available for what you want to do." Especially for community building, there's a pretty impressive catalog of commercial community plugins on the market that can achieve anything you can imagine.
However, Wordpress has always been to me a case where the farther you want to take it, and the more advanced the requirements for your site, the more bloated and buggy of a mess it becomes. I love the extensibility of the booming plugin market, however I dislike how fragmented and spotty it can be at times. You're site may end up depending on some obscure plugin that the author may simply abandon out of thin air.
Granted this can be the case at times with any platform, but numerous times I've been involved with building a large WP site that ended up being a delicate balance of plugins all modified to try to work together, and the nightmare trying to maintain it.
We just looked into (won't mention name) one of the best darn looking all-in-one WP gaming themes on the market, which literally packaged in every feature on our requirements list. But on closer look at reviews and comments, my thoughts on Wordpress mentioned above started to show through.
That's why we're considering going with Xenforo, which is one of the most compact, lean and optimized platforms I've ever worked with. While WP might be a more extensible CMS that can have forums added, Xenforo is a powerful and STABLE forum that can have other things added. I guess that's the dilemma with our choice.
Currently we're weighing (for the Xen option) using some of these:
- [XFA] Tournament
- [XFA] Roster
- Nobita Social Groups
- Form/application plugins, etc
I'd love to hear any thoughts or opinions you may have on working in Xen vs Wordpress!
Thanks for reading.
