Community Opinion Help! IPB vs XF?

BrandonT

Member
Ok, well I currently have an IPB license with IP. Content. Basically have been in a tough debate on if I spend $200 in a custom skin or if to drop the money in buying XF. I am looking for opinion's on it pros/cons, how it compares to vb and such and the most important thing to me that IPB is sorta lacking the modding community?

Personally sorta need stuff like a full points system / donations system / groups system / arcade / and general attracting forum style.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
 
I've no idea what specific question you would like answered. IPB is much more mature with many other products such as IP.Content, while xf is young.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

My only specific suggestion would be to sit down with a blank piece of paper and make a list of what things are important to you, then try to locate those things for both IPB & xf (though you seemed to have mentioned vb also).
 
Depends what is important to you.

After first discovering this site and software 6 months ago (well before the 1st Beta was released) , I have gone from being a full time professional IPB skinner who was a curious skeptic about xenforo to totally switching from IPB to Xenforo - this after a 8 year association with IPB and a highly successful career as a Custom Skinner and Premium skin provider.

IPB is good software, very mature, very solid, very big and weighty.

Xenforo is modern, slick, quick, and most of all FUN!

btw... I am surprised you can get any kind of decent Custom Skin for IPB for $200 that is less than half the starting price of any of the senior experienced IPB skinners.
 
LOL you have to know what answer you're going to get. Of course the majority of people on the official XenForo business forum are going to say XenForo.
So are you asking because you want to be talked into purchasing a license? Because, as you know, we don't have a full points system, or an arcade. Not sure what you mean by "groups system".

So play around with it here for a few days, fall in love, then purchase a license. :)
 
I don't think xF has everything to meet your needs right now, but probably will before the end of the year.

xF is lightweight compared to IPB in my opinion(which is a good thing).

xF doesn't have an arcade add-on, buy solution to that is that I use heyzap, which uses facebook login to play the highest quality games. You can see an example here: http://inspireromance.com/pages/Arcade/#

xF doesn't have an article system either, but does have 3 or 4 portals that are all good for managing blocks/modules. I prefer xenPorta.

xF has several free add-ons that are worth mentioning. A blog that is in beta stage, xenporta(portal), xenCarta(lite wiki), xenMedio(video management), xenAtendo(events management & calendar), TiagaChat (ajax shoutbox/chat), and [bd] Banking (points system).

There are many more free add-ons worth mentioning, but I like the time. I just mentioned the major ones you may be interested in.

In xF, there are groups that can be created and given certain permissions. Also, you can create subscriptions in which members can purchase via paypal. You can make it so that if a member buys a subscription to a group for $20 USD(donators), they will be automatically placed in a group, for example: "donators", which get special privileges for donating. ;)

BTW, google likes xF alot :)

Those are just some quick points I wanted to make. If you have a small community, you could consider switching, but you won't have all you need until the end of the year. If you have a large community, I don't recommend switching at this point. Maybe in a year it would be worth it...
 
Thank you for all the replies. Reason I posted here is cause I knew there would be some IPB conversion's and I just haven't seen much XF discussion on the IPB board.

I guess the big thing to me was after seeing a lot of the vb modders bring some of their products over if this would be the place to be in terms of mod add-ons as my members love doing virtual video game trading with a points system and vb had the best systems.. My forum is still relatively small (200+) which I don't think I wold be able to convert the members / topics but I have the worse time with google at the moment so if this product does very well with it that would probably be what wins me over.
 
I currently use IPB and it is a very good product with a lot of features ... That said however if I could get the features I need for my community on xenForo I would almost certainly switch over. xenforo is a lot faster and IMO a lot more user friendly on front end than many of the other pieces of forum software out there. So as said above it just depends on what you need.

Honest opinion? Put a list of what you need in this topic and Im sure you'll get a more specific answer to your question.

Honest answer? if you can get what you need from xenForo, then it is really a no brainer. xenForo is a new state of the art piece of forum software IMO
 
I currently use IPB and it is a very good product with a lot of features ... That said however if I could get the features I need for my community on xenForo I would almost certainly switch over. xenforo is a lot faster and IMO a lot more user friendly on front end than many of the other pieces of forum software out there. So as said above it just depends on what you need.

This begs the question tho.......... would XenForo be as fast, with all of those features added? Would they not bloat and weigh down this software?
 
This begs the question tho.......... would XenForo be as fast, with all of those features added? Would they not bloat and weigh down this software?
It does indeed. However have added around 20 or so modifications to it for this reason so far and all is lookin good :) .. End of the day you can run invision without any of the modifications or extra applications and it still doesnt compare for speed IMO
 
I still think xenforo is the way to go despite it being new and light with features. In my mind it's built a solid foundation, more importantly gave us a great styling & template system so whilst other paid solutions aren't even close to the quality, usability of the styling system when xenforo gets around to implementing those spiffy features they won't be backtracking themselves developing the important ones because they are building that foundation now.

To me, all ipb are doing at this time is back tracking, refining features bring them upto date so sometime in the near future they'll be visiting alot of their features and refining whilst xenforo has this already with only new innovative features to add. Don't get me wrong, IPB is a nice solution but I find the ui I mess, not at all organised so I suspect they will be re-visiting key areas where (again) xenforo will be adding to.

For me, xenforo is the future forum solution which is why now I'll build my community while it's in it's infancy and not worry about imports, redirects etc.

Another great thing I'm starting to see is the modding community is showing signs of growth at a nice pace, and even before v1 is out we are seeing Portals, blog and gallery add-ons which are of a high standard and free. To me, and judging by user experience the modding community will get stronger in it's release rate.
 
For the time being I would still go with Invision Power Board, as the collection of skins and modifications is much larger (and, being completely honest, of better quality). I'd happily buy XenForo once/if that changes, though.
 
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