Max Fridman
Well-known member
Oh boy, it's been a while since the last time. We made a drastic decision: to switch to the basic Xenforo theme and customize it.
Since 2016, we have been using Themehouse UI.X2 as the basis for our theme. Of course, using UI.X2 gives you access to countless customizations, but unfortunately at the expense of many immediate features.
For example, updates or implementing new add-ons. This requires implementing them first on the default theme and then adapting them to UI.X2.
Furthermore, UI.X2 is a slow infrastructure and is no longer as up-to-date as it once was with new features, etc. Since the Audentio team has moved to AC.UI, they have only kept UI.X2 compatible with the latest version of Xenforo.
We began working on this transition when Xenforo 2.3 was released a year ago. In 2.3, deprecating JQuery also required our internal team to rewrite many add-ons. A few days ago, we made the transition. We have certainly lost some UI.X2 features and encountered the limitations (now anachronistic in 2025) of the Xenforo base theme.
For example, header management in the mobile version. Or postbit or avatar management. In short, we had to write new add-ons to replace the UI.X2 features we lost.
Some lost features, to give you an idea:
- The extended footer with links to social media, widgets, descriptions, etc.
- The “reply” button located in the discussion title block.
- The welcome block located on the homepage and in sections that invited guests to register.
- Improved header and menu management.
- Improved subpage and submenu management.
We have restored some of them, and the forum is now navigable, whereas after the update the header was unusable. The same applies to navigation. Finally, all add-ons have been rewritten (ours) and restyled (third-party ones).
We decided to revise the design of some elements, such as secondary pages and menus, to which we applied icons, and we removed breadcrumbs where they were redundant. And we reduced many elements, obviously emphasizing the discussions.
The forum is much faster, thanks to the improvements made by Xenforo in 2.3. Furthermore, implementing new add-ons is extremely fast, because developers work purely on the default theme and not on UI.X2
Homepage view:
Forum list view:
Thread list view:
Topic view:
Inforge has many add-ons, and we have tried over time to reduce them in order to avoid being too dependent on third-party developers.
But it is difficult with the current functioning of Xenforo.
Inforge currently has 34 internally developed add-ons and 58 third-party add-ons. Only 10 of these are critical to the functioning of Inforge, depending mainly on reputable developers such as: Xon, Siropu, Painbaker, and DragonByte.
With all the changes, we have tried to maintain the style of the old design, which our visitors and users are accustomed to. Inforge has been online since 2007 and has undergone many major design changes, but it settled down in 2021.
I hope this discussion will be useful to new forum creators in understanding how much work goes into maintaining a community.
With few disruptions, implementing new features, and maintaining high quality standards.
We still have some changes to apply and some bugs to fix, but we are happy with the result
