New home for all XenForo documentation

Although we still have a little way to go before our vision is fully complete, the first phase of our documentation overhaul is now live!

Previously our manual and developer documentation were stored in two separate sites, powered by MkDocs, and our REST API endpoint documentation was in a page node, right here on this forum!

1770292289887.webp


Now all of the documentation is in one place, docs.xenforo.com, and you can navigate between the Manual, Developers and API documentation from the top navigation.

It now includes improved search powered by Algolia and features much improved REST API documentation including code samples for many common languages.

For the most part the content remains the same as it was, but in the future we will be reorganising, rewriting and extending our documentation to ensure it becomes a valuable resource for new and old customers alike.

All of our documentation is now fully open source (including the manual) and hosted on GitHub! We appreciate the help so far from contributions, especially kind folks such as @QuackieMackie, towards extending the developer documentation. If you have spotted something missing, outdated, or just in need of any sort of improvement, post an Issue or submit a Pull Request and we'll be excited to get it merged.
 
Click to expand...
Chris D said:
It was updated approximately an hour before this thread was created, i.e. when you posted it was already working ;)
Click to expand...
Let me apologize to the rest of the community for delaying XF 2.4/3.0 for having the XF staff launch a major investigation all day because I consistently got redirected to the old docs page due to my browser aggressively caching the redirect. Shame on me.
 
Last edited:
minihoot said:
I think this is great, because then if anyone wants to make any edits (spelling errors, etc) they can just fork the repo, then make a PR.
Click to expand...
Dev docs have actually been open source for years, but they were largely unmanaged, which is what led to them becoming outdated. (An example of this is the Demo/Portal add-on example not working any more.)

Making everything open source is definitely a good thing, and it was something people asked for a long time ago. However, it will only really work if staff actively review and manage PRs.
 
Chris D said:
We have enough to be working on and, sometimes, it makes a lot of sense to use dedicated tools for specific things.

The same reason we haven’t written our own version of GitHub, or Slack or an email client in XenForo. These tools already exist and are very good at what they do and supported and updated without us needing to do anything.

That doesn’t mean XenForo can’t be used to build a docusaurus clone, of course it could. We just don’t want to.
Click to expand...

No one wants xenforo to become GitHub or Slack, but in 2026, forums are dying, and for this reason, they must evolve and not just be forums.
I don't even think xenforo should become like WordPress, but it should allow admins to create a site with articles and categories much better than it does now (where the articles section is simply a forum section with a slightly different look and feel, and since it's very basic, you haven't used it for documentation).
I was also disappointed when I saw that you used an external program for the documentation (which is very well done, both in terms of content and program design), because what xf lacks is a system that can make the forum evolve into a real site.
 
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree there.

XenForo has evolved a lot over the years to accommodate different types of content and it will continue to do so, with improvements happening as needed. Many very large successful websites use XenForo for their entire front end, including articles, without needing specific add-ons to do so. So the question would be, why can't anyone?

We wouldn't use the article system for documentation but it is an article system and not a documentation system. The same reason we wouldn't use forum threads for such a thing because they are best suited for discussions rather than documentation.

Any XenForo native solution for documentation is something, as I already said, we do not have the time or inclination to manage or support ourselves, as this would detract from the many other things we want and need to be working on.

You'll have to just trust me when I say that a separate system for documentation is the best way forwards here on multiple levels, and that's not a reflection in any way of the capabilities of XenForo, it's a reflection of time, and the desire to use the right tools for the right job.

Simply: I could hit a nail into wood with a wrench, but a hammer would be better. We could probably modify the wrench to work better as a hammer, but we don't have time as we're trying to build an entire house.
 
Chris D said:
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree there.

XenForo has evolved a lot over the years to accommodate different types of content and it will continue to do so, with improvements happening as needed. Many very large successful websites use XenForo for their entire front end, including articles, without needing specific add-ons to do so. So the question would be, why can't anyone?

We wouldn't use the article system for documentation but it is an article system and not a documentation system. The same reason we wouldn't use forum threads for such a thing because they are best suited for discussions rather than documentation.

Any XenForo native solution for documentation is something, as I already said, we do not have the time or inclination to manage or support ourselves, as this would detract from the many other things we want and need to be working on.

You'll have to just trust me when I say that a separate system for documentation is the best way forwards here on multiple levels, and that's not a reflection in any way of the capabilities of XenForo, it's a reflection of time, and the desire to use the right tools for the right job.

Simply: I could hit a nail into wood with a wrench, but a hammer would be better. We could probably modify the wrench to work better as a hammer, but we don't have time as we're trying to build an entire house.
Click to expand...

If I may say so, not as a criticism but as I imagine you at Xenforo already know, but perhaps not everyone is aware of this. Other platforms specifically for forums (which I won't name) have simply developed bridges with more specific CMSs such as Ghost.

These are official bridges, supported by Ghost and the software in question to connect them, for example by connecting users/premium user management/newsletter sending, and so on.

This obviously solves the problem of having a platform that performs various tasks. For example, I wouldn't mind if Xenforo did this too. Buying something like this from a third-party developer exposes me to a risk that I don't want to take. There are solutions for WordPress, for example.

I would prefer it to be an official Xenforo add-on.
 
@Max Fridman an official WordPress bridge would also be very useful, given that approximately 50% of existing websites in the world are built with WordPress, but obviously there will be the usual response that "these are customizations that are of little interest"...
 
Back
Top Bottom