Some tough questions for the XF Team

Reeve of Shinra

Well-known member
Hey guys, first off congratulations once again on your latest endeavor. It looks great for an alpha and its creating quite a buzz. :)

Underneath the buzz of it all, a few people expressed some concerns and as I'm somewhat curious about the response myself I thought I would take the liberty of asking.

A lot of core team members that worked on vbulletin in the past appear to be involved with xenForo now. Obviously that is a strength given the fact you work well together and have tremendous experience in this area but Jelsoft way prior to the IB days was not a perfect company. How do you see yourselves avoiding the mistakes they made?

More to the point, and not to sound rude but sometimes candid works best:

1. What can Kier do now that he couldn't do when he was product manager of vbulletin?

2. Jelsoft always had issues communicating with their customers about upcoming changes (even prior to IB getting involved) and at times it was like pulling teeth to get yes and no types of answers. On the flip side, I think IPB has done an outstanding job of keeping their customers in the loop with their developments without necessarily giving away crucial info to competitors.What are your thoughts about this (if any) and where does XF plan to be in this scale of things?

3. I'm going to beat an old horse... the CMS ... vb customers have wanted one for over 10 years and half ***ed or not, they only got on last year.

I'm sure there are NDA's in place and you probably can't speak towards the specifics of why it took 10 years to accomplish. I'm equally sure that there are probably technological reasons for the delay. It even sounds like XF is being built with this kind of expansion in mind. My question is -- under your guidance, how will we avoid a situation where we are left hanging 10 years for a highly demanded product that never materializes? Will the communication be clear enough that if someone asks for product z tomorrow, you could say 'yes its in the works for later this year' or 'no, we don't plan on doing it this year'.

Thank you,

- John
 
The IPB point and CMS point is what I want to know. I either want this forum to work seamlessly with Wordpress or for you guys to recreate a wordpress environment that works seamlessly with this forum. I'm sick of wanting to integrate a quality single blog platform with a quality forum.
 
I think the need for a CMS is over stated personally. There's a need for one certainly, but sometimes people act like it's as vital as having a "new post" window. It isn't. It's a nice add on for what remains a minority of sites.

I wouldn't want to see stuff like this hold up development of the forums.
 
Good questions.
For the vB CMS, I think they were focusing on forum and forum only. But of course this is just my thought. And you can't get a clear answer only from Kier and Mike.
 
There are surely enough threads/posts about CMS already. Kier and Mike have said they will look at a CMS in the future,the forum software comes first. They also said that there is no point producing a CMS only to find that it is does not have the features people wanted, it requires a research period and member input. Whatever they do there will always be those that say it isn't right.

This is an alpha release and the devs time needs to be used on the forum for now.
As to "openess" read the forum,look at the devs posts .
 
What can Kier do now that he couldn't do when he was product manager of vbulletin?
It's more what the software can do that should be interesting. We have completely new architecture that allows us to develop extremely fast without endlessly chasing unexpected regressions.

Jelsoft always had issues communicating with their customers about upcoming changes even prior to IB getting involved. What are your thoughts about this (if any) and where does XF plan to be in this scale of things?
I would like to point out that although the developers were the public face of Jelsoft, we were not the owners and therefore the features that were developed and the way the company operated were subject to the will of the owners.

Conversely, the XenForo team are the company owners and we believe it is in everyone's interest for us to be open and transparent about what we are doing and where we are going. Hopefully you will have already seen this playing out in our communication here on the forums.

vBulletin customers have wanted [a CMS] for over 10 years and they only got one last year.
It's not our place to talk about the ins and outs of what Jelsoft did and did not do. We were only employees and it would be unprofessional to discuss such things. Once again, I will point out that XenForo is not Jelsoft.

Will the communication be clear enough that if someone asks for product z tomorrow, you could say 'yes its in the works for later this year' or 'no, we don't plan on doing it this year'.
That's perhaps idealistic - if someone comes up with a great idea that we want to implement but it would involve a massive realignment of current development priorities, we are unlikely to be able to give an answer on the spot. However, I would hope that we would be able to provide a strong presence in suggestions, helping to understand what our customers want and the technical limitations that might exist. Part of the strategy for handling suggestions involves allowing customers to discuss ideas, to ensure that a feature would be beneficial to a significant number of people. We expect to be making road map-style posts, so you can be aware of what's coming or what we have our eyes on.
 
I think the need for a CMS is over stated personally. There's a need for one certainly, but sometimes people act like it's as vital as having a "new post" window. It isn't. It's a nice add on for what remains a minority of sites.

The reason CMS isn't used more often is because there isn't a great package out there that allows us to seamlessly incorporate it into our sites. vB's implementation was a joke, IPB's implementation is beyond convoluted, and I have yet to see a GOOD bridge that allows one to incorporate a 3rd party package into the forum software.
 
The reason CMS isn't used more often is because there isn't a great package out there that allows us to seamlessly incorporate it into our sites. vB's implementation was a joke, IPB's implementation is beyond convoluted, and I have yet to see a GOOD bridge that allows one to incorporate a 3rd party package into the forum software.

Thats exactly the issue - Its a 3rd party application.

If the forum software was designed to work for that 3rd party application it would probably fall short in other areas.

Personally, I dislike wordpress and many other "CMS" or "Blog" type scripts out there - I feel if you want something like that, and you want it to work well with your forum software, you adapt the architecture and style of the forum software you use and write one from scratch - That way, you have exactly what you want working exactly the way you want it to.
 
1. What can Kier do now that he couldn't do when he was product manager of vbulletin?
I might or might not be wrong, but I think both Kier and Mike have a lot more freedom in what they can and can't do. Also, at least for now, they seem to be listening to the community and interacting with them quite much, which means XF will keep improving.
 
Kier, thank you for the direct answers ...

@ some of the others who posted: the questions were less about a CMS or a blog or any particular component as it was about the philosophy that will be guiding the company as it moves forward.

Thank you
 
Focus on what you do best which is the forum. Once you start pleasing people into making blog, CMS, gallery, your core product will suffer.
There is no reason for people like us who like the best of both world which means Wordpress for CMS, XF for forum, etc.

With this in mind, I would really appreciate if a SSO API is developed so we can get Wordpress and other apps like Wikipedia to login using the forum user database.
 
...the XenForo team are the company owners and we believe it is in everyone's interest for us to be open and transparent about what we are doing and where we are going.

This is what I thought was happening, and fully appreciate the situation.

However, I would hope that we would be able to provide a strong presence in suggestions, helping to understand what our customers want and the technical limitations that might exist. Part of the strategy for handling suggestions involves allowing customers to discuss ideas, to ensure that a feature would be beneficial to a significant number of people. We expect to be making road map-style posts, so you can be aware of what's coming or what we have our eyes on.

Perfect.

Knowing what things should, or should not be done, and why, is the most important to me. In addition, if something cannot be done then information on how to do it.

Almost as important, especially long term, would be keeping track of 'how to do things'. An example would be some of the options being discussed that could be put in a template edit or admincp. Many examples of the template edits have already been made, and knowing where those template edits are located, for people new to this forum years from now is going to be challenging (aka documentation).

Which gets back to the age old problem of keeping track of, and being able to access good information people type on forums.

.
 
With this in mind, I would really appreciate if a SSO API is developed so we can get Wordpress and other apps like Wikipedia to login using the forum user database.

Login and integrated comments - I don't need anything extra from a bridge between xF and Wordpress / MediaWiki. The new WP 3 is awesome and needs badly a forum solution that could be xF for a lot of people. Just imagine a WP 3 network of blogs, each one with its xF for comments and all sharing users. Yummy!
 
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