Getting started with xenforo

[alitech]

Hi all

Very new to the forum and I have a few questions before i jump into buying the license and starting a conversion. Please help if you can.

1. I love avforums and their blog style site which has a forum pegged on. Is this custom functionality of can we achieve this out of the box? I want to build organic traffic through content and then ask visitors to join the forum as well. I want to build a new community.
2. Can I get theme designers to customise a theme for me? Is this an expensive undertaking? I love whats been done with ukbusinessforums.co.uk
3. Can I migrate from phpbb? I want to ensure I get everything including members, posts, forum categories etc.

Please let me know how I should proceed and if there is anything I need to be mindful of.

 

[alitech]

Just saw this.. and WOW.. i want this. https://demo.themehouse.com/xlink/wp/

Is this a wordpress site with xenforo plugin?

 

[sbj]

1. avforums is heavily customized. Out of the box you cannot do it. There are some portal addons which would help you to achieve a similar effect (like Bob's famous Showcase/AMS/Blogs addons or Jaxel's XenPorta and probably 1 or 2 other ones).
2. You can, there are good designers around but it will be expensive, like between 200-600$ I would say.
3. Yes, but you have tio import to XF 1.5 version first. Only the 1.X version have the importer for phpbb. So you import to 1.5, and then you do a normal upgrade to XF 2.1.
4. It is a XF site with a wordpress plugin from themehouse.

 

[DarkGizmo]

The WP plugin you see is called XPress - XPress which will run you a whooping $300 from the looks of it.

As stated, something like XenPorta (which is a portal/article system that's built around Xenforo, doesn't use Wordpress instead integrates directly into your forum) by Jaxel is much more affordable -

Which offers a similar experience to XPress.......without the bridging of Wordpress.....

 

[alitech]

@sbj and @DarkGizmo

Thank you so much. Invaluable comments. I really appreciate it. I don't need to go as customised as avforums at this. I just need to kick off a content-based website with a forum attached. Both hold equal importance for me.

I will definitely look at xpress.

For now, I think I will go ahead and purchase the license and give it a go at installing it myself.

Should I consider anything else apart from the base license to kick-off?

 

[sbj]

Should I consider anything else apart from the base license to kick-off?

If you mean for XF, no, you don't need anything else. And if you do, you can always purchase later the additions you want.

Other than that, of course you need a domain and a hosting provider to be able to host a forum, but I believe that was not the intention of the question.

For installation, look at the manual.
Basically download the XF files, move them over to your host (data and internal_data must be full accessible).
Then create a database on the server. Configure the config.php file (where your credentials are saved).
Hit yourdomain.com/install and follow the instructions.
Done.

 

[alitech]

Yup, thats all very straightforward. I will be able to install it myself. I use cpanel on my host and creating DBs and managing PHP versions is quite simple.

I feel I am going to be coming back here to get more support. Especially when I try to import from PHPbb to v1.5

 

[alitech]

@sbj

Any chance you can tell me which other addons will provide similar functionality as Xenporta? I am going to look at all these options before i decide the addon.

 

[sbj]

Well, the other big one I already told you. The highly recommended products of @Bob. They are not listed here on XF (only the XF1 version), but you can acquire them on Bob's site and I linked to example of how it works. So his AMS/SC/Blogs addons are portal addons (also another one called Reviews which is private I think). From experience I can recommend them.

Othat than those 2 developer's addons, you can create a portal in XF without any addons https://xenforo.com/community/resources/page-as-portal-homepage.5663/
based on your threads.

Or an alternative would be ThemeHouse's one: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/th-featured-threads-and-content-portal.7233/
also based on threads.

 

[sbj]

Maybe another alternative would be this one:

Unmaintained - [Xenbros] Home Blog for Xenforo2

Home-blog addon allow you to you get a latest thread of selected node on separate page with pagination like wordpress blog on xenforo with featured thread option with Custom image url if there is no attachment in thread Featured thread option...

xenforo.com

Not sure how that one works so, but it looks like also based on threads.