Migrating from vBulletin.. a little more complicated that normal

[Andem]

Hey guys,

I've been meaning to perform an upgrade to my current site, whose forums are powered by vBulletin 3.8.x. vBulletin 4.x has never been an option; I'm a seasoned coder and vBulletin 4.x makes me nervous when I compare it to vB 3.x. vB 5.x is completely out of the question (without even having to look at the code).

I've always been a big fan of the stuff Kier has created. Thus, I am very interested in xenforo and I have been since I first heard of it, but never needed to jump ship and now is when I'm considering it.

I currently use the vB session table and cookies quite extensively across an entire site, along with many functions built-in, originally coded by many who are with xenforo today.

I essentially include global.php and use many of the vB functions and userinfo variables:
$vbulletin->userinfo
$vbulletin->GPC
is_member_of();
and some global templates.

When I jump off of this sinking ship, it won't be difficult to code and integrate with xenforo, but is there much documentation on xenforo's code? Is there perhaps a chart available where I can compare vB's functions to XF's functions?

I really, really want to grab myself a copy of this forum suite and start integrating it.

Cheers

edit: Just to add some clarification: Switching probably wouldn't be a problem when it comes to coding, but I don't really have days to spare wading through code. TY!

 

[Jake Bunce]

A fellow vB 36'er. I too have done extensive custom development on my vB 3.6 site.

I am very experienced with both vB 3.6 and XenForo so you are welcome to ask me specific questions about development as needed.

Generally speaking, when moving to XenForo you will be transitioning from a largely procedural code base to a very object oriented one. This can take some getting used to but it's a superior code base once you get used to it.

These videos are an excellent primer for XenForo development using page nodes:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/editing-templates-and-defining-a-callback-for-pages.7226/

Page node callbacks are nice because they allow you to create custom content within XenForo without having to mess with controllers, routes, etc. It allows you to "get your feet wet" without being overwhelmed by other stuff. And this addon I made allows you to easily publish page nodes to the navbar which again avoids extra complexity:

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/nodes-as-tabs.9/

 

[Andem]

A fellow vB 36'er. I too have done extensive custom development on my vB 3.6 site.

I am very experienced with both vB 3.6 and XenForo so you are welcome to ask me specific questions about development as needed.

I hope you really mean it I may become bothersome at some point!

I edited my post to mean 3.8.x but indeed the majority of what I did develop was on 3.6.x. I highly appreciate you reaching out to offer assistance and object oriented *is* superior.

Generally speaking, when moving to XenForo you will be transitioning from a largely procedural code base to a very object oriented one. This can take some getting used to but it's a superior code base once you get used to it.

These videos are an excellent primer for XenForo development using page nodes:

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/editing-templates-and-defining-a-callback-for-pages.7226/

Page node callbacks are nice because they allow you to create custom content within XenForo without having to mess with controllers, routes, etc. It allows you to "get your feet wet" without being overwhelmed by other stuff. And this addon I made allows you to easily publish page nodes to the navbar which again avoids extra complexity:

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/nodes-as-tabs.9/

Thanks a ton! They seem like very good resources and I'm going to look into them tonight. I actually don't need to create pages within xenforo, I just call some of the (customized) functions from the forum package and use the sessions/cookies created by it.

Also excited that xenforo uses jquery! I spent far too much time learning the ins and outs of YUI.

 

[Jake Bunce]

See my post in this thread regarding manual session setup in a custom XenForo-integrated script (the kotomi addon in this case):

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/get-user-information-custom-field-in-kotomi-script.35003/