My Saga and What I Would Need Xenforo To Achieve

Rick King

New member
All,

Going to lay things out for you. I am considering Xenforo for my business/website. I have tried a ton of things over the years. The latest monstrosity was an attempt to combine the best of Wordpress, PHPBB3, and Boonex Dolphin 7 ( http://www.kingofalltrades.com/ )

That website is everything to us. There are some vital features that we would have to retain, and here is the short list:
A single website that gives us everything we have with Wordpress, with a fully functional and easy to manage Forum system.

I somewhat hope Xenforo can do that. I am however attempting to avoid setting us up for another epic fail like we faced after we tried to integrate phpbb3 and dolphin 7. I need a single website platform that gives us the full publishing power of wordpress or a reliable replacement, and fully featured forum system, with ONE LOGIN.

Right now, we have endured the current platform integration for about a year. It has been a royal pain I cannot describe. For some reason, there are issues with the session cookies/logins. Even when you login perfectly for months, occasionally something gets out of synch and you can't access the forum area. Our login situation is consuming far too much management time (assisting people who get stuck with the basic instructions to clear their browser settings of all session cookies).

If we can get what we need, and I am willing to work with someone who can prove to me they have the expertise to make it happen, we will switch to Xenforo.

SO - for those of you out there reading this - let me hear your thoughts, devils advocate/good/bad etc. I need to end up with a fully working website that has the best of at least Wordpress/PHPBB3 (or VB) and it would be nice to have some of the features available through a broader system like Boonex Dolphin 7.

Rick
 
I just found the WP integration, so that gives me a huge advantage going ahead. Thanks for the quick reply - it appears this forum is more alive than I anticipated, the developers and members here are very helpful so far.
 
I am looking forward seeing your community upgrade to 2011 with XenForo, and then level up next year even further when XenForo releases 1.1, 1.2 and 2.0 in the future. I know I've upgraded for a reason, and I don't regret it.
 
Before XF I had a forum (SMF) with Wordpress two.
Much work to keep two systems alive with updates and so on.
After I have bought XF I had only used it with Jaxxels Portal. No Wordpress (wich is indeed a nice software)
Articles are a part of my forum now and I can tell you: My users love it.
The success is superb and better i had thought in my dreams. More traffic (because everything is catched by the "whats new" function) and 30% more registered users.
Think about it, the content must be where the users are: in the forum

sorry for my english, hope you understand it
 
Right now - there are a few things I need to tackle if we will migrate to Xenforo. The forum system is very smooth and stable, and since there is a wordpress bridge already, next step is tackling chat. I'm digging around right now looking for a good way to handle that if we shift.

So far things are looking hopeful. I am becoming more and more impressed with Xenforo. What amazes me is that I never heard about it before considering all the websites I've designed in the past.

Of course the true test will be getting a demo site of my own up so my company can review it. I am working on that soon once I complete the research phase.
 
Before XF I had a forum (SMF) with Wordpress two.
Much work to keep two systems alive with updates and so on.
After I have bought XF I had only used it with Jaxxels Portal. No Wordpress (wich is indeed a nice software)
Articles are a part of my forum now and I can tell you: My users love it.
The success is superb and better i had thought in my dreams. More traffic (because everything is catched by the "whats new" function) and 30% more registered users.
Think about it, the content must be where the users are: in the forum

sorry for my english, hope you understand it

It sounds like your experiences might help me shape my own direction a great deal. Would appreciate if I could look at how you have things setup (if you could send me a message - I will take a glance). Thanks for the great feedback so far from all of you.
 
Thanks for the feedback guys. I thought this might take a few days longer, but I'm moving along fast. I think if we nail down the chat we are sold. I am going to start digging into a few of those links you provided above and then start charting out directory structure. As with all things wordpress - getting the news sitemaps right will be a huge key, along with making the RSS down in the root of the domain so the feeds pick up perfectly.....

Rick
 
There is a working wordpress integration. But I really have no knowledge about Dolphin 7 and its features.

Boonex Dolphin - any version - was good in the beginning. The execution was poor and too many developers touched the backbone code. It is falling apart at the seams lately. I am ditching it on all of my sites. It has so many glitches I cannot describe them all on a page, much less dozens of pages.

Xenforo should let us make a smooth transition to a stabler platform and tie things together.
 
Ok - have a single question up front as I dig into this: Rather than use a 3rd party IRC server, can't I just set up my own and run from that? If so, what IRC platform would I need to point it to. I'm currently using RMS.
Not too sure about what you want here.

Did you mean you want to have an IRC running on your own server? If that's the case you're going to need root access to your server and install/run an IRC deamon.

You can get a list of IRC deamon from here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_IRC_daemons
The popular freenode is using Atheme. You can find it here http://www.atheme.net/

But if you have created your own channel on some server, I'm sure every IRC client will be able to point to it no problem.
 
Yes - above to the IRC on my own server - that is my goal. Also working on my own conferencing software to allow my team to conduct training sessions for financial investors.

Also - some random questions that are popping out at me:

- Setting up new pages/navigation seems to be less simple than I envisioned. Is there a simple explanation anywhere?
- If I were to set my "home" page for xenforo to pull in the latest articles my team generated from wordpress (our publishing platform) how would I go about that?
- Is there a membership upgrade plugin? I have a Gold membership option on my site already and would have to have a way to control permissions for specific groups to access certain areas of the forums, track payments, and integrate with Paypal....

I'll post more questions once I get back from my experimentation.

Rick
 
Yes - above to the IRC on my own server - that is my goal. Also working on my own conferencing software to allow my team to conduct training sessions for financial investors.
Well I installed this to check it for you and apparently you can change the server so assuming you know how and have the access to setup the irc daemon on your box you could just point it to that and then set the default chans that you want.
dfgdfgsdfgdfsg.webp

Also - some random questions that are popping out at me:
Gotta love those
- Setting up new pages/navigation seems to be less simple than I envisioned. Is there a simple explanation anywhere?
Yes there is http://xenforo.com/community/threads/how-to-add-a-new-tab-in-the-navbar.7781/ ... pages are click to create, the navigation area requires a small bit of editing. You could simply create a page ..set it to not show up in the node list...
dsfdscvafbgasdfg.webp
...and then add the tab pointing to the page

I'll post more questions once I get back from my experimentation.
I share that sentiment and like your style...welcome to the community.
 
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