Car forum critique

[MattForo]

FD Owners Club – Mazda RX7 FD Owners Club

fdoc.co.uk

I'm looking for a forum critique with constructive feedback. Most of this is using ThemeHouse add-ons which work really well out of the box with minimum tweaking. Please ignore the google ads, we don't display these to anyone who's logged in

Overview: Niche forum for car owners of the Mazda RX7 FD, members post issues, images, sales, general car related topics & arrange meetups. The site has been online for under 2 years.

Theme: UI.X by @ThemeHouse

This sites main add-ons:
[TH] Covers
[TH] Nodes
[TH] XPress
Forum Sales
XenAtendo 2
Showcase

Any constructive feedback is much appreciated

 

[RobinHood]

Lovely site. I think a better font for post titles would really help give your home page an edge though.

Also a line to seperate postbits, as with posts. It doesn't looks good with no separation.

Also it's strange to get errors about user upgrades when trying to view user profiles, then to be told there are none available. I think that could possibly be more a failing in the way XF handles user upgrades though. I've noticed on a lot of sites you can't even view the upgrades options without logging in, which isn't a good experience for a guest visitor trying to understand what the site is about and what upgrade options are available before even registering. Especailly when they run into a userupgrade/paywall restricted link on the site.

 

[MattForo]

Hey @RobinHood thanks for the feedback! I noticed there's no separation on post comments however this is not the case when logged in.

Great spot on the user upgrades error! I've never noticed this before I wouldn't want to make profiles public to guests however, looking into 'upgrades' or modifying that template will now go on my 'to do' list.

 

[xydrine]

The homepage (assuming that's TH XPress) looks very nice and clean - having an integrated CMS has always been a point of contention for my forum because our CMS admin hates wordpress so finding a middle ground has been challenging for us. But yeah, XPress does a really really nice job of bridging that.

 

[MattForo]

The homepage (assuming that's TH XPress) looks very nice and clean - having an integrated CMS has always been a point of contention for my forum because our CMS admin hates wordpress so finding a middle ground has been challenging for us. But yeah, XPress does a really really nice job of bridging that.

I'd find out what he hates about it, i've found XPress to be an amazing solution and would recommend it. The price for what you get is unbelievable value.

 

[xydrine]

I'd find out what he hates about it, i've found XPress to be an amazing solution and would recommend it. The price for what you get is unbelievable value.

Definitely not tryin to hijack your thread here - only responding to you here .

But, oh believe me, I have wanted to use a real CMS system for our new (XenForo) platform (after using vBulletin+Wordpress) for a while now, but unfortunately you know how older people are and new things, lol...

I have been trying to integrate as many functions/features as possible with our forum, so almost everything we use is integrated with XenForo directly via addons etc. XPress wasn't actually available when we started working on the CMS aspect of our forum, so we went with a couple other addons to take care of it, but if XPress (and it may already, but I don't believe it does - but I haven't researched it much since it is wordpress-related) had the ability to create articles inside of XenForo (i.e. via a new thread and 'convert' it to an article), that would be a done deal - we'd go with it in a heartbeat.

But being able to create threads/upgrade them to articles using the current system we are using is at the moment the "best" option for him (again, I give him crap for being old all the time, lol). If you were interested in seeing what we're working with... https://www.rdforum.org/content/ is our older, wordpress-powered CMS, and https://www.rdforum.org/index.php?ewr-porta/ is what we're working with now - I haven't done a lot of modification of the new page. But the way it handles articles is pretty nice: https://www.rdforum.org/index.php?threads/84604/

But yeah, I'd so prefer to use XPress, the way your homepage looks is just incredible.

 

[MattForo]

the ability to create articles inside of XenForo (i.e. via a new thread and 'convert' it to an article), that would be a done deal - we'd go with it in a heartbeat.

You can create threads through xenforo and convert them to articles, there's an topic option that's labeled 'promote to article'

I prefer to do it the other way around, when creating a Wordpress post you can specify which node you want a topic to be posted in.

I got lucky having a relatively new site, the problem you would have is with what you do with your current content. Best bet would be to clone your site in a dev environment and have a play with it

 

[xydrine]

You can create threads through xenforo and convert them to articles, there's an topic option that's labeled 'promote to article'

I prefer to do it the other way around, when creating a Wordpress post you can specify which node you want a topic to be posted in.

I got lucky having a relatively new site, the problem you would have is with what you do with your current content. Best bet would be to clone your site in a dev environment and have a play with it

Gotcha, I actually have a similar function which may actually be a part of our current "CMS" addon - https://xenforo.com/community/resources/xf2-8wr-xenporta-2-portal-pro.6023/ - come to think of it, it probably is:



It's been so long since I've messed with it.

So XPress has a similar function which actually posts an article to Wordpress (though you can do it the other way around)? I should definitely do a bit more research into the addon - if this is the case then it sounds like this may be ideal.

I was actually considering using this new style system (Featured Articles) for the CMS - https://www.rdforum.org/index.php?featured/ - instead of XenPorta2 but again if XPress allows for the XenForo Thread->Article function, this would again be more ideal.

Thanks for the heads up!

 

[MattForo]

Yup xpress has the exact same option, it's even labeled the same! That xf2 addon looks ideal, I went with XPress to take advantage of wordpress features such as Woocommerce

 

[xydrine]

Yup xpress has the exact same option, it's even labeled the same! That xf2 addon looks ideal, I went with XPress to take advantage of wordpress features such as Woocommerce

Oh cool. Yeah the "Featured Threads" addon we use - this one - https://www.rdforum.org/index.php?featured/ - actually from ThemeHouse as well - https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-featured-threads-and-content-portal.7233/ - which was a tad pricey - does look a bit similar to the XPress addon. Obviously it works a bit differently since it's not a bridge, but I'm really debating whether or not to use it solely for our CMS functionality, and do some modifying of the appearance to make it less bulky in terms of some of the elements (remove some of the text over the images, change avatar layout, etc)... considering the price, primarily. I'd have to go with XPress for $80 right after spending $60 on Featured Threads and then just not use it at all, lol...

That, and I like to try to use as few third-party systems as possible.

So many decisions, so little... time.

Anyway, sorry again for hijacking your thread.

Did you have any specific concerns about your site/appearance that you want some further input on? It's the least I can do after the hijack, lol.

 

[JoyFreak]

I really like it, good job!