Questions of course!

Trix

Trix

Member
Good afternoon sexy Xenforo people!

I am running a IPB forum (Spare me your pitty!)

I'm prepared to lose my galleries to get over to Xenforo. I had a super busy site with vB4 (No really i did!) and then i moved to IPB, people struggled to use it, it broke alot, and my search results dropped massively. Now i want it all back

I have paying membership currently which is optional, and people actually pay too, and i will probably lose this if i move to Xenforo but i'm willing to take that risk.

Here's my questions

1) I have paying membership, people are in a additional membership group. Will they stay in this group if i import to Xenforo? I've played with the demo and seen you can do paid memberships, i really don't want to have to add everyone by hand

2) Anything that i should be aware of losing if i move over? I know i lose my gallery, chatroom etc. Any basic forum features i might lose, that i will not have thought of? For example, i've seen someone say somewhere you can't see who edited a post (might be changed now). That kind of thing.

3) Suggestion of a replacement for a chatroom?

4) Is there a direct support method here? With IPB if i have a problem, i submit a ticket and they fix it for me. It's normally worth the upgrade fee alone.

5) Addons, the ones released here, does every single one, work with Xenforo right now? For example, i know with vBulletin certain releases would break an addon until it was updated. Is this the same with Xenforo right now, or does everything work fine? From the vBulletin days i have this bad habit of seeing an addon thats a few months old, and assuming it doesn't work anymore :p

6) I have a VPS cloud hosting package, IPB is eating at resources. Does anyone have any tips of how to see what resources my site uses? I would love to do some before/after comparisons of server usage, and visitor/seo changes.

That's all i can think of for now, thank you for your time
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
Good afternoon Trix!

No pity, don't worry :) No software is perfect.

1) The available importers will maintain user groups.

2) Yeah there are little bits. Last edited date, etc. is missing but there are several add-ons for it. There's a couple of gallery add-ons, plus Robbo is in the process of creating a new Gallery add-on for XenForo (probably a paid release).

3) There's a few chat rooms, Taiga Chat and CometChat are the popular ones.

4) Yep, you get ticket support included. Often the community support here is quicker to get an answer. And we're awesome :)

5) Pretty much all add-ons in the Resource Manager are currently supported. Best tip I can provide: Read the add-on description, then read the last few pages of discussion. The last few pages of the discussion will obviously contain messages from people about current bugs, etc.

6) I'll let someone else answer specifically about server resource monitoring, but I have heard that XenForo is a lot better on resources than other forum software so hopefully if you do a comparison you will see an improvement.

EDIT: I think I'm going to start mentioning this in my posts in pre-sales support, it's only fair.

Currently XenForo Ltd is going through a lawsuit which has been filed by Internet Brands (the owners of vBulletin). You will find lots of information about the lawsuit if you search for it. A trial date has been set for January 2013. XenForo is widely expected to win the case if it gets to court and some of the complaints against XenForo have already been dropped.

As a result of this impending lawsuit, the development of the next version of XenForo (XenForo 1.2) has been delayed. We were originally supposed to see a beta in June. It may be unlikely that we see the next version before the lawsuit is over.

In the meantime, you'd be buying an incredibly stable piece of software which performs great and is a pleasure to use and work with. Support tickets are still being dealt with by the community moderators here, Slavik and Jake Bunce. The developers have confirmed that any security updates and urgent bug reports will be resolved.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Trix said:
Good afternoon sexy Xenforo people!
1) I have paying membership, people are in a additional membership group. Will they stay in this group if i import to Xenforo? I've played with the demo and seen you can do paid memberships, i really don't want to have to add everyone by hand
Click to expand...

The groups will be imported so yes, they will stay in that group.

3) Suggestion of a replacement for a chatroom?
Click to expand...

We use this: http://xenforo.com/community/resources/taigachat-ajax-shoutbox.115/

4) Is there a direct support method here? With IPB if i have a problem, i submit a ticket and they fix it for me. It's normally worth the upgrade fee alone.
Click to expand...


There is ticket support for customers :)

5) Addons, the ones released here, does every single one, work with Xenforo right now? For example, i know with vBulletin certain releases would break an addon until it was updated. Is this the same with Xenforo right now, or does everything work fine? From the vBulletin days i have this bad habit of seeing an addon thats a few months old, and assuming it doesn't work anymore :p
Click to expand...


Everything in http://xenforo.com/community/resources/ should work right now, after new versions of xenforo are released most addons still work. I have addons that I installed a year ago that still work :)
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Thank you both for the quick responses. That all sounds good, just need some more information about question 6.

As for the chatroom, i would rather not use a shoutbox as a chatroom, and was planning on using cometchat as a paying member feature only, not a chatroom option.

Which brings up another question. Can i do IF statements in the templates with Xenforo? So i could use a small if statement to only show cometchat to people of the right usergroup?

Thanks.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Yeah, CometChat has XenForo support so that sounds like your best bet.

Yes, you can do if statements :)

It would look something like this:

Rich (BB code): 
<xen:if is="{xen:helper ismemberof, $visitor, 2}">

Show chat​
<xen:else />

Don't show chat​
</xen:if>

That would show the chat to all members in usergroup ID 2, hide it for anyone else.

They can get more advanced too, such as having an array of usergroups, but yes, it's possible. The template conditionals are awesome.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Great replies thanks, really pushing me to make the leap! Another question has popped into my head.

I love the trophies, people love receiving little awards for nothing lol. I've looked on the demo site and i was wondering can you add more options to the available ones for trophy conditions?

For example, i see you can award a trophy if someone DOESNT have an avatar, but not if they do? Can i award trophies if people fill out a custom userfield? Like i might set one up for people to put their dogs name, and if they fill it in, they get a trophy, that kind of thing?

If a trophy is created, will it search to see if people already fullfil its criteria and award them the trophy? So if i set a trophy for having 100 posts, will it check after i create it to see if people have 100 posts, and give them the award?

Also lol, does this mean i could give people a trophy for buying a paid membership
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Yep, absolutely.

You can award trophies to certain usergroups so if your paid members are in a certain usergroup then this is no problem.

Trophies are updated every 40 minutes (configurable) and are awarded retrospectively (I believe).

Yes you can do it on custom user field.

As for the avatar thing - that has always confused me too :unsure:
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Sorry i thought of another one!

My forums are currently at /forums/ and i have a re-direct html page in the root directory to send people there. I did have a homepage but deleted it.

Now with Xenforo, i'm thinking i can just make a 'page' thing in xenforo and have that as my homepage, as it would be integrated with Xenforo properly.

Is this a good idea or should i just leave the forums as the landing page for people? And is it a good idea to install Xenforo in the root directory like that, or should i put it in a subfolder like /forum/ or /community/

Hmmm
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
It's entirely up to you. If you think you might have a XenForo based homepage in the future then it might make sense to install XenForo in the root directory.

A default installation of XenForo will automatically redirect http://yoursite.com/forums to your forum home page.

I'm just thinking that maybe you could do something with XenPorta which is a popular "portal" add-on.

That can be configured so your home page hits the portal home page and your forums are at /forums/ so either way, this works without having to change your existing directory structure.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
That's confused me a little bit. I've seen Xenporta and it's quite nice, might be a posibility.

My forums are currently at /forums/ . When i install Xenforo, i would put it somewhere else either the root directory, or /forum/ or even /community/ like here.

Can i create a 'page' inside Xenforo and use that as the main mysite.com landing page, like the Home link on this site. I'm wondering for SEO purposes if its better to just have no homepage and have my domain name take people right to the forums. Eurgh, getting myself confused now.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I would probably say, if you're not going to bother having any decent content on the home page, then you're just as well to not have one and carry on doing what you're doing already.

You'd only get an SEO benefit to having a front page if you actually have a front page with some content on it.

So I would probably just install XenForo at /forums/. If you wanted to add a landing page later, then you could do.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Trix said:
That's confused me a little bit. I've seen Xenporta and it's quite nice, might be a posibility.

My forums are currently at /forums/ . When i install Xenforo, i would put it somewhere else either the root directory, or /forum/ or even /community/ like here.

Can i create a 'page' inside Xenforo and use that as the main mysite.com landing page, like the Home link on this site. I'm wondering for SEO purposes if its better to just have no homepage and have my domain name take people right to the forums. Eurgh, getting myself confused now.
Click to expand...
k peep this
8thos said:
If you have a main site that has different software then you should put your forum in a subdomain/folder, whatever. This way your site is accessible by forums.golfstuff.com and golfstuff.com/forums

For example, IGN has their forum on a subdirectory/folder http://boards.ign.com or http://ign.com/boards both work. www.ign.com itself is on the root and uses a different software.

My forum is on the root and uses xenporta as it's main site, so I wouldn't need something like that. ^^^ With xenporta your able to designate a part of your forum to look like a main site. It's awesome. Very convenient. The forum is on the root but with a board prefix http://www.8thos.com/board You can still sorta get the same 'oh this is just the forum part of the site' effect if you make featured forum threads on your portal look like articles with it's own sidebar for example: http://www.8thos.com/threads/metal-gear-solid-the-movie.17927/
Click to expand...
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Thanks for that information, i have just been given the go ahead from my boss (Read as wife lol) to go ahead and switch, so now i need to get and do the final preperations.

One last question hopefully lol. I'm going to install Xenforo in the root directory, because i want when people to go to www.mysite.com them to come to a PAGE that i created in Xenforo. Either with Xenforo, or using Xenporta. I hope that's right, i think i might have confused myself.

If i do this, i need to put some IPB redirects in the IPB folder as it says in the conversion steps. If i do this, can i no longer access my IPB forum? I may need to access it at some point, to retrieve peoples photos from the gallery which wont be ported over.

So fricking excited right now! Had a Moderator check the demo site last night, and she is useless with technology and hates change, and she LOVED it to bits.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote

Similar threads

Four
  • Question Question
Email and plugin system questions
Replies
2
Views
268
Paul B
Paul B
V
  • Question Question
Inquiry Regarding Support and Payment Options
Replies
2
Views
447
VaskOLD
V
Jakkal
  • Question Question
VBulletin 5.x to Xenforo Question
Replies
4
Views
330
MySiteGuy
MySiteGuy
C
Improving the 'feel' and access of our forum
2
Replies
37
Views
1K
ChrisArthur7769
C
C
  • Question Question
Description with topics? Moving and sorting comments?
Replies
6
Views
395
Opus X
Opus X
Top Bottom