Getting Started With XenForo : Newbie Question

[Harsh Agrawal]

Hey Guys
I have considered all the forum options, and finally selected vBulletinV4 and Xenforo.
I already have one license of vBulletin V4 and installed it 2 days back on my sub-domain. Though due to SEO implication, I decided to shift my forum to new domain and it will be a fresh installation.

Well, I know it's a Xenforo community, but I'm sure many of you have shifted from vBulletinV4 to Xenforo, and may have some suggestions and good advice.

My goal here is to create a engaging forum for my blog, and here are few questions:

1) Which is an easier forum to manage (Xenforo or vBulleinV4)
2) How to make my Xenforo forum SEO friendly?
3) Is there any way I could make individual thread/posts noindex from Search engine?
4) Where can I get Xenforo custom template or which is the best place for hire a Xenforo template designer?
5) Is Bluehost Shared hosting good for Hosting Xenforo forum?

I'm a newbie to forum world, and would love to hear any advice, suggestions you have...
Harsh

 

[Adam Howard]

Hey Guys
I have considered all the forum options, and finally selected vBulletinV4 and Xenforo.
I already have one license of vBulletin V4 and installed it 2 days back on my sub-domain. Though due to SEO implication, I decided to shift my forum to new domain and it will be a fresh installation.

Well, I know it's a Xenforo community, but I'm sure many of you have shifted from vBulletinV4 to Xenforo, and may have some suggestions and good advice.

My goal here is to create a engaging forum for my blog, and here are few questions:

1) Which is an easier forum to manage (Xenforo or vBulleinV4)
2) How to make my Xenforo forum SEO friendly?
3) Is there any way I could make individual thread/posts noindex from Search engine?
4) Where can I get Xenforo custom template or which is the best place for hire a Xenforo template designer?
5) Is Bluehost Shared hosting good for Hosting Xenforo forum?

I'm a newbie to forum world, and would love to hear any advice, suggestions you have...
Harsh

1) XenForo hands down. It has the familiarity you have come to expect on the homepage, so you users will have virtually no learning curve. And the AdminCP is very easy to navigate.

2) XenForo out of the box is already SEO friendly, but it does of course have the option for SEO friendly links built into it.

3) That would be against Goolge policy to have content only for search engines. But if you mean have some forum / nodes public and some private to select groups, yes. You can also add no index links in your robots.txt document

4) Here on XenForo. There is a wide range of free and paid styles (themes) here.
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/categories/styles.29/

5) XenForo out of the box uses virtually no resources. So I do not see a problem with Bluehost. However if you're looking for a new host, I use Canspace.ca (ref link) and of course you can read reviews for both (and many more) on WebHostingTalk.com

 

[Chris D]

1) XenForo
2) Nothing, it's already very SEO friendly
3) You can edit templates and use conditionals to add noindex to certain threads
4) Out of the box styles some free, some chargeable are available in the Resource Manager here: http://xenforo.com/community/resources/categories/styles.29/
5) XenForo will work with pretty much any hosting. It's very much down to generally how good the host is (good reputation, good support, good value, good reliability)

 

[Giverny]

I'm not a very experienced XF user but I've had many years of experience with vB4. I can't answer all your questions due to limited knowledge, but here's what I can say:

1) Personally, although my forum admin experience began with vB, I find XF incredibly easy to manage. It's all very much GUI based which was a major selling point for someone like myself with limited knowledge. At the same time though, there's plenty of room to go more advanced if you so require.
2) XF is very SEO friendly out of the box. Definitely more so than vBulletin.
4) I've found Audentio (http://www.audentio.com/) to be awesome so far. Great aesthetically pleasing skins and excellent support - I'm happy to recommend Audentio to anyone who needs a XenForo style.

 

[tyteen4a03]

vBulletin 3's ACP controls is kind of centralized but at the same time is also kind of all over the place, and it's only worse with 4 and 5.

 

[Olami]

Thanks a lot for all the details, am new to xenforo and am trying to use it on my existing blog and will be like 'mydomain/forum', hope it will work perfectly for me also?

Am totally a newbie in xenforo, any suggestion and i deas will be appreciated.

Thanks.