Newbie to XenForo

[Detomah]

I'd been waiting on vBulletin 5 to ever become useable for a long old while, having made the mistake of paying for an upgrade licence from my old vBulletin 4 site and in the end I gave up waiting and having seen a few other people using XenForo, a few names I remember from vBulletin, I thought i'd check it out, so bought a licence and had a play and wow, absolutely loving it, now completely got rid of the old site and in process of rebuilding from scratch with XenForo and can't believe how much more straight forward everything is, add-ons, settings, etc. Only dissapointment I have, is that I waited so long to do this.

I've checked out a few tips and guides and taken notice of security measures and stuff like that and gone for a few add-ons, I am still learning though, so was wondering....

Any essentials, addons, tips, tricks that could be pointed in my direction that I should be doing or adding as a matter of it simply has to be done? As a newbie to XenForo... Although I've been around vBulletin for what feels like centuries.

Great work guys, loving the work.

 

[Lisa]

Welcome to XenForo

 

[Adam Howard]

Welcome to XenForo @Detomah

 

[Lisa]

Any essentials, addons, tips, tricks that could be pointed in my direction that I should be doing or adding as a matter of it simply has to be done? As a newbie to XenForo... Although I've been around vBulletin for what feels like centuries.

Addons are dependent on what type of site you run and what you need. The one that I really would recommend for any site though is Brogan's Featured Threads - that's a must have

 

[Adam Howard]

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/tinhte-xentag.770/

^ Will both forum / thread tagging as well as individual post #hash tags (with user group permissions so you can limit which groups and which form of tagging you wish to use)

 

[Gazhyde]

Welcome to XF

There are so many really good add ons, it's hard to list them all. My current must haves are...

• Featured Threads Portal as already mentioned (running as my home page)
• XenMediaGallery as a photo gallery.
• Tenants FoolBotHoneyPot to instantly stop all spambot registrations dead.
• Tenants XenZine Articles for articles (duh)

 

[Detomah]

The one that I really would recommend for any site though is Brogan's Featured Threads - that's a must have

Oooh, I hadn't spotted that one, that looks ideal for what I need.

Welcome to XF

There are so many really good add ons, it's hard to list them all. My current must haves are...

• Tenants XenZine Articles for articles (duh)

Another great one I think I may have to have.

Got the Honeypot, first thing I did was look through all the antispam stuff and security stuff, although I'm sure there's probably more I can do, pesky spammers and spam bots. I hunted for a gallery add-on before I got my licence, that was a definate must have...

Thanks for the warm welcome peeps.

 

[Lisa]

There are two gallery addons - one by Sonnb and one by Chris Deeming. Both are very well supported and written by great coders and you'll hear good things from users of both - so the one to go with is a matter of personal preference. We use Chris's on XenAdmins and I have a copy of Sonnb's, which I was using on another site

 

[TPerry]

http://xenforo.com/community/resources/tinhte-xentag.770/

^ Will both forum / thread tagging as well as individual post #hash tags (with user group permissions so you can limit which groups and which form of tagging you wish to use)

And it will add a BUNCH of queries to your site. Big discussion over at another forum how for one site it helped kick the queries number up to 111 on the index page (and other pages since he shows it there also). No thanks... I'll keep my 11-17 queries thank you.

 

[Adam Howard]

And it will add a BUNCH of queries to your site. Big discussion over at another forum how for one site it helped kick the queries number up to 111 on the index page (and other pages since he shows it there also). No thanks... I'll keep my 11-17 queries thank you.

@xfrocks developed that add-on and to my knowledge it's very stable and doesn't have any of the issues you're describing.

If it did, I'm sure you would have a lot of people claiming so in the support thread
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/tinhte-xentag.32231/

You seem to be the only person making such a claim. So perhaps you can back this up and inform @xfrocks about this.

But I suspect your problem lies with another add-on as this add-on is one of the top downloaded add-ons here on XenForo.com With over 1,600 downloads... I'm sure someone else would have noticed by now. So I'm sure your problem lies else where.

 

[TPerry]

If you are referring the XenTag (which the specific post I quoted referred to) I refer you to:
https://theadminzone.com/threads/your-xenforo-board-forum_list-index-loading-stats.116198/
https://theadminzone.com/threads/yo..._list-index-loading-stats.116198/#post-826580
https://theadminzone.com/threads/yo..._list-index-loading-stats.116198/#post-826577
https://theadminzone.com/threads/yo...index-loading-stats.116198/page-2#post-827036
https://theadminzone.com/threads/yo...index-loading-stats.116198/page-2#post-827037

I feel pretty confident that MattW knows where he speaks from.

 

[Adam Howard]

If you are referring the XenTag (which the specific post I quoted referred to) I refer you to:
https://theadminzone.com/threads/your-xenforo-board-forum_list-index-loading-stats.116198/
https://theadminzone.com/threads/yo..._list-index-loading-stats.116198/#post-826580
https://theadminzone.com/threads/yo..._list-index-loading-stats.116198/#post-826577
https://theadminzone.com/threads/yo...index-loading-stats.116198/page-2#post-827036
https://theadminzone.com/threads/yo...index-loading-stats.116198/page-2#post-827037

I feel pretty confident that MattW knows where he speaks from.

I have no issues with it and I have 75 add-ons, including XenTag.

Index Home
Timing: 0.0996 seconds Memory: 13.185 MB DB Queries: 12

Forum views
Timing: 0.0769 seconds Memory: 12.981 MB DB Queries: 10

Thread view
Timing: 0.0814 seconds Memory: 13.518 MB DB Queries: 14

AdminCP
Timing: 0.0431 seconds Memory: 8.653 MB DB Queries: 8

The actual XenTag Homepage (http://www.sociallyuncensored.eu/forums/tags)
Timing: 0.0807 seconds Memory: 10.843 MB DB Queries: 11

^ That last one is the XenTage homepage and it shows the top 100 tags.


So where exactly is this causing an issue? And again, this is one of the top downloaded add-ons with over 1,600 downloads. So why is this not being meantioned by anyone here on XenForo.com ?

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/tinhte-xentag.32231/

 

[TPerry]

Did you read the threads... pretty sure they discussed exactly where and that disabling the add-on the queries dropped...
Specifically one person mentioned

Since I'm showing trending tags in all page.

 

[Adam Howard]

Did you read the threads... pretty sure they discussed exactly where and that disabling the add-on the queries dropped...
Specifically one person mentioned

Then the "claim" is misleading, because there is no default option to show trending tags on every single page.

You can do so with [bd] Widget Framework, but that in of itself is 2 independent add-ons "playing with each other". So you can argue a conflict between 2 add-ons.


This explains why myself and the other 1,600 downloads have had no issues.

 

[rdn]

FYI: @Dinh Thanh also confirm those lots of queries.

Great update but it seems like my query count jumped from 14 to 64 on forum home. Disabling this addon drops it back down.

Widgets will be cached. You always see them because you are in Debug mode.

 

[Adam Howard]

FYI: @Dinh Thanh also confirm those lots of queries.

Yes, he confirmed that this happens in debug mode and that widgets will be cached (when debug mode is off).

This is because widgets are not cached in debug mode. You shouldn't be using your live site in debug mode anyway.

Even Mike has explained why you should not be running your live site in debug mode
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/another-reason-to-not-have-debug-mode-enabled.73536/

Outside of debug mode (with it off), you're not going to have all those queries loading on every page, all the time.

But within debug mode (with it on), you will because the widgets are not cached and so you're running the queries on every page load.

This again is why myself and the other 1,600 people who downloaded that do not have an issue.

 

[rdn]

Hehe... I don't leave debug mode enabled for long time, I just enable it for a few seconds to see those stats .
How come I gather those stat's without debug mode enabled?

 

[wedgar]

I'd been waiting on vBulletin 5 to ever become useable for a long old while, having made the mistake of paying for an upgrade licence from my old vBulletin 4 site and in the end I gave up waiting and having seen a few other people using XenForo, a few names I remember from vBulletin, I thought i'd check it out, so bought a licence and had a play and wow, absolutely loving it, now completely got rid of the old site and in process of rebuilding from scratch with XenForo and can't believe how much more straight forward everything is, add-ons, settings, etc. Only dissapointment I have, is that I waited so long to do this.

I've checked out a few tips and guides and taken notice of security measures and stuff like that and gone for a few add-ons, I am still learning though, so was wondering....

Any essentials, addons, tips, tricks that could be pointed in my direction that I should be doing or adding as a matter of it simply has to be done? As a newbie to XenForo... Although I've been around vBulletin for what feels like centuries.

Great work guys, loving the work.

We also made the switch from VB 5 to XF this past January and have never regretted leaving VB.

The user community here is truly helpful and the developers are outstanding.

 

[Adam Howard]

Hehe... I don't leave debug mode enabled for long time, I just enable it for a few seconds to see those stats .

How long you have debug mode on is irrelevant. The moment (the exact moment), you enable debug mode you will immediately experience that issue, because the widgets will not be cached (as explained before).

How come I gather those stat's without debug mode enabled?

We're going around in circles and it was explained. Because they are not cached in debug mode.

Debug mode is just that... A mode in which is designed for webmasters, administrators, and developers to debug code. Which means you will want things in real-time as they happen, without any cache; so you can properly diagnose thing.

So long as you do not enable debug mode, your "problem" is not a problem, because it does not happen.

You can validate this by watching from the terminal, assuming you have a VPS / Dedicated Server, that the load goes away when you disable debug mode. If it does not, you should ask yourself why this is affecting you and not the other 1,6000 downloads, including those who are on shared hosting.

If this really was a problem... Everyone would be experiencing it and with 1,600+ downloads we would all be hearing about it.

 

[Detomah]

Thanks for the replies, although, it does seem it's opened up a can of worms regarding that one addon...