Can xenForo meet my needs?

[i.am.joel]

Hello,



I am looking for forum software that meets all or most of the feature requirements listed below. I would very much appreciate if you could tell me which of these xenForo supports OOTB and for those that are not supported if it would be possible to add the feature.

1. Auto refresh of forum page when Topics are added or modified. To be clear, the user should not have to refresh the browser window to see new content. Unread content should be clearly indicated.
2. It should be possible to see each topic in a thread view. As “threading” views are implemented differently in various forums please see <https://community.jivesoftware.com/thread/259086> for an example of how I desire it.
3. A WYSIWYG editor for posts.
4. The ability to embed multimedia within a post.
5. The ability to attach files to a post.
6. Group as well as individual permissions.
7. Support for tags. Preferably tags should be available from a canonical list on a forum by forum basis.
8. Search facility based on both text and tags.
9. Ability to watch both forums and topics.
10. Ability to archive old posts.
11. API for integration to other software, f.i. a knowledge base.

Many thanks in advance for your consideration.



All the best,

Joel

 

[Liam W]

3,4,5,6 and 9 come as standard.

There is no tag support built in, but there is an add on for it.

Search support text. It obviously doesn't support tags

You cab create a forum to archive them.

You can create addons for integrations, or there is an add on that adds a rest API

I'm not sure what you mean by 2, and 1 doesn't seem to make sense for a forum.

Liam

 

[MattW]

tag search works with the add-on in question though

 

[i.am.joel]

3,4,5,6 and 9 come as standard.

There is no tag support built in, but there is an add on for it.

Search support text. It obviously doesn't support tags

You cab create a forum to archive them.

You can create addons for integrations, or there is an add on that adds a rest API

I'm not sure what you mean by 2, and 1 doesn't seem to make sense for a forum.

Liam

Thanks for very quick response Liam.

About 2, if you take a look at the link I embedded you will see and example of the layout I would prefer. The forum is going to be use internally at the organisation by the support team to communicate about cases in progress among themselves. Therefore it is really desirable to have the conversations maintain context.

On 1 it really does make sense for our use case. It is not feasible for the support personnel to be pressing refresh all day to see the new content. I know this feature is not typical in forum software, but it does exist. It can be enable f.i. by using ajax in the page to force a refresh.

Again many thanks,
Joel

 

[Liam W]

@i.am.joel well, this is the thread layout. It looks somewhat similar?

This is the only layout

Liam

 

[feldon30]

1. You could do a template conditional for Tech Support staff (a user group you'd create) when viewing their main ticket forum, to refresh that topic list every 60 seconds or so. Reloading all the forums for EVERY user would be very hard on your server and not a good experience for your customers.

3-5. Built in.

6. I discourage people from doing individual permissions. It becomes a nightmare to manage later on. XenForo supports multiple usergroups so you can layer on permissions by putting people in a primary group and then several other groups to increase their access.

7. As stated, tags are not built in but there's a plugin.

8. You'd have to check with the developer of the tag plugin to see how search works.

9. Not sure on this.

10. You can move posts and topics to a subforum. If you want to move them to another database to keep the database size down of the main forum, that's not something built into XenForo to my knowledge.

11. XenForo is objected-oriented and written with model-view-controller techniques, so you can hook into it in many ways. You'll need to have a good programmer who is familiar with these concepts to add onto the software, but people are very helpful here on the XenForo support forums and will help out on questions like how to do X. There may also be code examples.

 

[Ernest L. Defoe]

On question #1 here is an add-on that should do what you are wanting http://xenforo.com/community/resources/sonnb-live-thread.1479/

As far as the other questions it seems as if they have been answered several times. With the add-on I linked to you can select which forums(nodes) this add-on will be used in. Just have to make sure the Live Thread option is checked when creating the thread.