XF 2.0 Replacing WordPress with Xenforo

[rfc0001]

I know this topic has been discussed ad nauseam in various forums, but it's still not "solved" in my mind, so want to create a new conversation around my specific needs and see if I can get some ideas. Currently, I have a WordPress site with 100+ static informational pages and hundreds of news articles as well as Forum built on Xenforo. Traffic to my site is about split between the WordPress and Xenforo websites. The problem is they feel completely disjointed. The themes are different, forum users can't comment on WordPress, and visitors to the WordPress Pages and Posts are completely unaware of the forum.

Ideally, I would like to host the informational and news articles in Xenforo, then display them on the home page in a more CMS-like format - e.g. a news feed in the center of the screen (e.g. like Facebook) with article titles/excerpt/image sorted by descending date of thread or most recent comment, then have a list of "groups" (forums) on the left of the home screen so people can jump into other threads.

Is there any set of add-ons/themes to accomplish this? Any other recommendations on how to integrate content and forums? Links to sites that have done this well? I've dug into this on multiple occasions and always come up empty handed at the end of the day, so any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[JamesBrown]

I use xenword, then you have the best of both worlds. Google loves a wordpress site, and with this addon the forum users interact seamlessly with the wp content . It works a treat and is well supported.

 

[rfc0001]

My problem with WordPress bridges is you are duplicating the content in both the WordPress site and Xenforo, so it's still disjointed - actually more disjointed. It's not an acceptable solution for me - at least not from what I've seen. Do you have an example of site that integrates this well? I tried looking a the add-ins creators website and doesn't look like even he is using it to sync threads and comments - just for SSO. I'm also leery of the support for that particular add-on. I've posted questions to the add-ons discussion page here with no response for months, and I don't see a discussion forum on the developer's own site for the add-on.

 

[Ozzy47]

You might like this, https://xenforo.com/community/threa...e-for-bringing-wordpress-into-xenforo.150114/

 

[rfc0001]

You might like this, https://xenforo.com/community/threa...e-for-bringing-wordpress-into-xenforo.150114/

Yeah, the demo site for that add-on does a much better job demonstrating the seemless look and feel between the WP and XF page/comments, e.g.:

WP: http://demo.themehouse.com/xpress/wp/2018/06/29/7-examples-of-playful-weather-app-uis/
XF: https://demo.themehouse.com/xpress/xf/index.php?threads/7-examples-of-playful-weather-app-uis.13/

However, the XF page content is still just an excerpt of the actual content. What I really want is the nicely formatted content itself to be posted to Xenforo (e.g. have the first post of the XF link looks like the content in the WP post). Then, you wouldn't have any need for WP at all. I wish XF had a "HTML" page type that allowed you to post HTML content and still have a threaded discussion below it. So, rather than create a a new thread you would create a new page, which would show up in the forum like any other thread, but the first post would be nicely formatted HTML without all the chrome of a XF post, followed by standard XF post replies. I really wish XF would add support for "content" like this out of the box, but lacking that it seems like an add-on could easily do so. Likewise, it seems feasible to modify the home page of XF using themes/add-on to be more WordPress like with lists of articles with titles, excerpts, and images.

 

[rfc0001]

XenPorta 2 Portal also looks promising - can promote threads to articles, which still show up in the forum, but are formatted as articles (no post chrome). Combined with some other add-ons for formatting threads (e.g. tables), this might do the trick. The only thing I'm not sure about is how flexible the home page layout is to show multiple article columns. Not a huge fan of their demo site layout.