Looking at moving to XF

[calaf]

Few questions from a bit of a technophobe!

I currently run VB 3.7 and am thinking about moving across to XF.

Not gone too deeply into it yet, but as my users are all used to VB and this is very different (especially the smileys that they seem to love using!) how easy is it for me to get it looking like my current forum? For example I have an image as a repeatable background for every part of every page that I would like to keep, amd image bars for the headers to go on.
I would also need to get the sidebar moved to the bottom of the page, which from a search would appear to be doable but is there a downloadable template that is more like the vbulletin style my users are used to that already has that done?

I don't have internet on my phone but I suspect some of my users will, so I would like to know how it displays on a phone or would I need to have a separate template for phones?

I am going to play with the online version and see what I can do with it and hopefully that will give me answers to questions I have but have not yet worked out from the interface thats there.
Thanks a lot

 

[Reeve of Shinra]

1. The people who made my vb style also have the same style for xenforo making my transition easy. That said, my staff members found xenforo way easier to customize.

I wouldn't worry about the a 'vb' like template, most members pick on this intuitvely and love it.

2. xenforo works great as is on my iphone. Nothing extra needed but the forumrunner app is available.

 

[Morgain]

Few questions from a bit of a technophobe!

I currently run VB 3.7 and am thinking about moving across to XF.

I'm also transferring a VB3.7 over.
First it's all way easier to customise. The admin side is SO much easier to navigate and get at things. The colours and sizes are all listed in detail. You may well not need a custom theme if you feel like playing for a few hours - an afternoon. Or else there are some good theme designers here.

I'm no coder but I get the impression the coders here find it good on making mods. It's all deliberately designed to be modular and supports comnbining or disabling / enabling to your heart's content.
There are mods now for portal, gallery, album, blog, quotes and lots of design like the navbars.
However I don't know how straightforward it is to transfer content from VB user Albums.
VB3.7 has a lovely user customisation on the profile page which hasn't arrived here yet.

So the mods and extra features are not yet quite as rich and multiple choice as VB.org - but a lot of the best coders have begun working here, plus all the main types of add-on are here in only one year. This is a very fast developing community.

 

[calaf]

Thanks a lot, I will do some investigating with it