Pro's and con's of portal vs forum on homepage?

Peter-Jan

Member
Hi,

What are the pro's and con's of installing Xenforo in the root (homepage) vs in /forum folder with a portal on the homepage?

I see a lot of sites using a portal, even those who are fully community focused, which makes me wonder whether there is research or data behind this choice.

I had a hard time googling this question as too many forums and portals show up in search results rather than admin discussion about them. Hence my question here.
 
Thanks. I think I'll install XenForo in the /community folder and point my homepage to that (as I won't do portal from the start). I figure google cares less about the home URL forwarding to /community than about the entire forum with all its links being changed from root to /community later on.

@Brogan Please tell me if this is a stupid thing to do.
 
Just as an alternate viewpoint. After experimenting with a lot of different homepage formats, the one that has worked REALLY well for us is one that has excerpts of quality articles that point to the full text. Basically what you get with a default WordPress/Joomla! blog style layout.

*If* you want to experiment with that, I'd suggest giving The XenPorta addon a spin, it's amazingly easy to work with, and the "RecentNews" module in the main content/center module position allows you to promote great content from your forums (esp ones that you specifically create as "Articles") to the home page.

Very impressive system, and certainly worth evaluating to see how it works for you... :)
 
Just as an alternate viewpoint.

Will look into XenPorta after I buy the license. Can't look at the screenshots right now but can tell you the homepage of 8wayrun.com is way too busy for me. All I'd need is a way to promote threads to homepage "articles".

I've been reading about your desires for an integrated XenForo forum/blog/CMS. Fully agree, but you need to be more specific about the details. Am writing my view on it right now in another thread.
 
You can use .htaccess to achieve that.

In my case though, I used to have a home.php file in the root and now my 'home' page is a Page so I just edited home.php to the following:
Code:
<?php
header('Location: http://www.example.com/community/pages/home', true, 301);

And then in your .htaccess file make sure you have:
Code:
DirectoryIndex home.php
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^home.php /community/pages/home [R=301,L]
 
Thanks! For my case I made a new .htaccess file in the public_html folder with the following code:

Code:
DirectoryIndex
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^ /community [R=301,L]

This works fine now, see http://boatingoasis.com.

For forwarding the www to the non-www, is it best practice to make a .htaccess in the www folder with the following code?

Code:
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Or is it best that I merge the three .htaccess files in the root? (Using RewriteBase for the path)
 
Ideally you should only have one .htaccess file in any one directory.

For any additional rewrite rules, just make sure they are placed above the XenForo rules.
 
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