Structuring and expanding a multi-town forum (top-level nodes per town)

[ValidHorseChewer]

I’m planning a forum that will eventually cover multiple towns, with each town acting as a top-level node (e.g. Nottingham, Manchester, Brighton).

Conceptually I’m aiming for something like:

• Town
  • Classifieds
  • Local businesses
  • Events
  • General discussion

I understand XenForo uses a /forums/ base for nodes, which is fine, though I'd like to swap that out for /city/ if possible.

For those who’ve done something similar:

• Did you keep towns as top-level forums, or group them under a single parent?
• Any gotchas around permissions, breadcrumbs, or navigation when scaling beyond one town?

I’m launching with a single town initially, but the long-term plan is multi-town.

For those who’ve started small and expanded:

• Did you point the forum home page directly at the first town’s top-level node?
• Or keep a neutral landing page from day one?

I’m especially interested in any SEO or navigation implications people ran into when adding more towns later.

I'm web literate, but a total noob when it comes to adminning XF, or the XF ecosystem in general. So please be gentle

TIA to any kind souls who are willing to share their knowledge / experience. At this point I'm just trying confirm that my plans are feasible, and if possible to avoid painting myself into a corner.

 

[QuackieMackie]

Hiya, a lot of this isn't where I shine, and before you read on I'd consider myself still pretty new to Xenforo.
But from my experience, if you have the know how, there isn't much you can't get Xenforo to do for you.

The topic I can give advise on is:

Conceptually I’m aiming for something like:

• Town
  • Classifieds
  • Local businesses
  • Events
  • General discussion

Xenforo uses node types, which you can read about here. I'd suggest having a look at the manual and dev docs. When I started looking at the software, I also found their YouTube channel helpful (even if it's a tad old, we still technically are on 2.3).

What this concept might look like in Xenforo would be:

Category (Town)
    Forum (Classifieds)
    Forum (Local businesses)
    Forum (Events)
    Forum (General discussion)

Then in the settings you could use the Create pages for categories option. Which then lets you create a page on this link https://example.com/categories/town/ The category page looks like this by default:


Then using Route filters you can find categories/town/ and replace it with townName/. This then gives you the url https://example.com/townName/

Now, I haven't done this in practice beyond this point, but I'm sure the community would be able to show you how to edit that category page.

---

That is one way you could handle this, I'm sure there are multiple ways of going about it. I just used this way to give you an example.

 

[ValidHorseChewer]

Thank you, that's really helpful. I will look at those docs. (Edit to add: They're actually very handy, and quite accessible to read.)

I actually would like to do website.com/{town} ideally, but I was under the impression we needed the /forums/ slug, or similar.

Something important I omitted from the original post, is that I will be on the cloud service, not self hosted.

Bolded as I can no longer edit the intial post.

 

[QuackieMackie]

Thank you, that's really helpful. I will look at those docs.

I actually would like to do website.com/{town} ideally, but I was under the impression we needed the /forums/ slug, or similar.

Something important I omitted from the original post, is that I will be on the cloud service, not self hosted.

Bolded as I can no longer edit the intial post.

I personally rent a server and manage it myself so I don't know the limitations of cloud. But that doesn't mean you can't develop add-ons locally still then upload to your cloud. Xenforo license lets you host a production server and dev sites provided they aren't available to anyone outside the org I believe it was.

I don't see why cloud hosting would be a problem though. The settings and edits I made in my example were all in the admin control panel.

 

[ValidHorseChewer]

I am a web dev so that is an option, if required. But until now I've been on the dark side (.net), so it would be a bit of a learning curve, and I would prefer to spend my time managing the site content instead of fiddling around with the tech stuff.