Hello folks,
I'd like to show you MGEVs.com, which I created in 2019 after seeing the MG ZS EV. At the time, it was one of the first genuinely affordable electric cars in the UK, available for less than £20k.
https://www.mgevs.com/
The site has grown modestly but steadily since then, helped by MG doing a very good job of selling EVs in the UK, Europe, Australia and many other markets around the world. In the UK, the MG4 has been especially popular, and the new MG IM5 is probably the closest thing you can get to a Tesla Model S for less than £40k.
The MGEVs.com style is mostly based on vanilla XenForo colours. The main visual changes are around tags in thread_view, where I have made them more prominent.
What I would like to show you today is how we are using our Locations addon to create a dealer finder and dealer discussion section.
The idea is simple: help people find their local MG dealer and then give them somewhere to ask questions and share genuine experiences.
For this, I created a dedicated dealer category. Under that are forums for each continent, then individual country forums where MG dealers are located. All of these forums use the Location forum type, which enables the map/location functionality.
Each thread represents one dealership, and each dealership appears as a location on the map.
Since MG is not sold in North America, I will use the UK dealer forum as the example:
https://www.mgevs.com/forums/uk-mg-dealer-discussions.14/
The first thing you see is the dealer map above the normal thread list. We use Google Maps for everything: finding and adding dealers, displaying the dealer map, opening Street View, and providing directions using tools most users already understand.
Each forum map can also include locations from subforums. I have used that option on the Europe dealer forum, so it can show all dealer locations across Europe:
https://www.mgevs.com/forums/europe-mg-dealer-discussions.19/
Below the map is the standard XenForo thread list, so the forum still feels familiar.
The normal thread filter tools continue to work and also affect which locations are displayed on the map. The tag filter added by Tag Essentials also allows people to narrow the locations by tag, for example edinburgh.
We use prefixes to distinguish between different location types, and those prefixes are also shown as different marker styles on the map.
We have added functionality to style prefixes using Font Awesome and custom graphics. For MGEVs, I use an MG logo SVG, which appears both in the thread prefixes and on the map markers.
Clicking a marker opens an info bubble with top-line thread information. Clicking the thread title in the bubble opens the discussion thread.
Opening a dealer thread shows the location map after post #1. For example:
https://www.mgevs.com/threads/arnol...dealer-discussion-opinions-experiences.14060/
From there, users can use the map, open Street View, or click the directions button, which opens their default directions app.
There is a lot more I could say about the site and how the dealer structure works, but the main thing I wanted to show is how a standard XenForo forum can be turned into a location-based directory without losing the normal forum discussion experience.
Please have a look and let me know what you think.
Cheers.
I'd like to show you MGEVs.com, which I created in 2019 after seeing the MG ZS EV. At the time, it was one of the first genuinely affordable electric cars in the UK, available for less than £20k.
https://www.mgevs.com/
The site has grown modestly but steadily since then, helped by MG doing a very good job of selling EVs in the UK, Europe, Australia and many other markets around the world. In the UK, the MG4 has been especially popular, and the new MG IM5 is probably the closest thing you can get to a Tesla Model S for less than £40k.
The MGEVs.com style is mostly based on vanilla XenForo colours. The main visual changes are around tags in thread_view, where I have made them more prominent.
What I would like to show you today is how we are using our Locations addon to create a dealer finder and dealer discussion section.
The idea is simple: help people find their local MG dealer and then give them somewhere to ask questions and share genuine experiences.
For this, I created a dedicated dealer category. Under that are forums for each continent, then individual country forums where MG dealers are located. All of these forums use the Location forum type, which enables the map/location functionality.
Each thread represents one dealership, and each dealership appears as a location on the map.
Since MG is not sold in North America, I will use the UK dealer forum as the example:
https://www.mgevs.com/forums/uk-mg-dealer-discussions.14/
The first thing you see is the dealer map above the normal thread list. We use Google Maps for everything: finding and adding dealers, displaying the dealer map, opening Street View, and providing directions using tools most users already understand.
Each forum map can also include locations from subforums. I have used that option on the Europe dealer forum, so it can show all dealer locations across Europe:
https://www.mgevs.com/forums/europe-mg-dealer-discussions.19/
Below the map is the standard XenForo thread list, so the forum still feels familiar.
The normal thread filter tools continue to work and also affect which locations are displayed on the map. The tag filter added by Tag Essentials also allows people to narrow the locations by tag, for example edinburgh.
We use prefixes to distinguish between different location types, and those prefixes are also shown as different marker styles on the map.
We have added functionality to style prefixes using Font Awesome and custom graphics. For MGEVs, I use an MG logo SVG, which appears both in the thread prefixes and on the map markers.
Clicking a marker opens an info bubble with top-line thread information. Clicking the thread title in the bubble opens the discussion thread.
Opening a dealer thread shows the location map after post #1. For example:
https://www.mgevs.com/threads/arnol...dealer-discussion-opinions-experiences.14060/
From there, users can use the map, open Street View, or click the directions button, which opens their default directions app.
There is a lot more I could say about the site and how the dealer structure works, but the main thing I wanted to show is how a standard XenForo forum can be turned into a location-based directory without losing the normal forum discussion experience.
Please have a look and let me know what you think.
Cheers.
