Think of XenForo as a site, not (necessarily) a forum

digitalpoint

Well-known member
There are a lot of default phrases that seem to have been written with the general mindset that the XenForo software is strictly for forums. For me personally, I tend to use XenForo as a framework for a site and sometimes (but not always) use the forum function as a support venue for customers/users. It would be nice if XenForo itself didn't think of itself strictly as forum software. Phrases that tend to include things like, "this forum" when referring to parts that aren't the explicit forum functionality tend to sound silly when you aren't using the forum function. I've has users contact me asking where the "forum" is (when there is no such functionality used) because a random default message referred to the forum.

XenForo software is software for a site, not necessarily software for a forum (although it certainly can and often times can do that too). I've turned people on to XenForo purely as an application framework (and they use it as such, because it's fantastic at is), not because they are wanting to have a forum/community.

It's been an ongoing thing where I need to override the default phrases, and just ran into another one, (the description where users pick a username)... this_is_name_that_will_be_shown_with_your_messages (This is the name that will be shown with your messages. You may use any name you wish.). Except no... this site has no forum, no threads, no posts, no conversations (it has no messages). How about this "is your public username"? Be it a message, your profile, etc.
 
Upvote 26
For the record, my original suggestion wasn't to do anything drastic like make XenForo primarily a framework and then have the forums be a module/addon. Leave it as it is structurally, I was just talking about tweaking a few phrases to make things make more sense for any situation, that's all. You know, think of itself as a "site", not necessarily a forum/board (oh ya, I said that in the original post). haha
 
The old forum that we replaced was built in a generic CMS (Drupal) and it was terrible forum software compared to Xenforo or IPS.
I once had to convert a BBPress forum over to XenForo. And the few times I've used BBPress, it was amazing...in how archaic and out of touch that software is with modern forums. One that really grinds my bananas lately is Discourse--hate it with a passion, yet a company I work for uses it, so 🤷🏽‍♂️.
 
I once had to convert a BBPress forum over to XenForo. And the few times I've used BBPress, it was amazing...in how archaic and out of touch that software is with modern forums. One that really grinds my bananas lately is Discourse--hate it with a passion, yet a company I work for uses it, so 🤷🏽‍♂️.
I was on a Discourse site briefly. Did not leave because of the software (lost interest in the site for other reasons), but it was definitely not my favorite online experience.
 
XenForo is forum software full stop. WordPress is a blogging platform full stop. You can mess with any script and try to make something else out of it for which it is not intended and you will end up in a big mess.
 
I have stated this many times, but I have a SaaS product that is built on XenForo. I made a decision early on that any phrase I use within the platform would be recreated with a phrase prefix "he_[PHRASE]". This would also require me to override a number of default views with custom add-on controllers. Its a lot of work, but I can still easy upgrade core XenForo and review the changes for each upgrade to make sure I don't have to upgrade custom template overrides.

The rigidness of some of these comments are interesting. Yes, XenForo is built to be a forum out of the box, but you can literally make it do anything...
 
XenForo is forum software full stop. WordPress is a blogging platform full stop. You can mess with any script and try to make something else out of it for which it is not intended and you will end up in a big mess.
Not sure that’s entirely true (that you will end up with a mess). XenForo is a fantastic framework that has a forum built on top of it by default.

Some things I've built (and work flawlessly) that have nothing to do with a forum:

Secret society platform that manages membership (invite only), voting, events, ticketing, staff, guest check-in, bar service (and shopping list automatically generated based on ticketed guests), automatic gender balancing of events (the system only allows a member to purchase a ticket if it wouldn't cause the gender balance of an event to be skewed), analytics for events, etc...

1649088625642.webp1649088680200.webp


Inmate tracking system... hey, did you know that the Unibomber recently got moved to a medical facility? Or that the guy that did the Fyre Festival is now in a halfway house?

1649088917756.webp

Outgress system that is for a mobile game and has had more than 142 MILLION emails forwarded from users to be processed: https://outgress.com/

Complete advertising system (replacement for AdSense/AdWords): https://advertising.digitalpoint.com/

Keyword tracker tool (over 100,000 users tracking over 3,000,000 keyword movements): https://tools.digitalpoint.com/tracker

Search engine spider that spiders the web 24/7: https://tools.digitalpoint.com/cookie-search

The point is that you don't need to do anything weird or kludgey to utilize XenForo's fantastic framework for applications.
 
I'm in the process of building a site using XF's framework, too. I actually purchased a license a few days ago just for that. So, any suggestion that falls in line with that, I'll probably vote for. That said, and I don't intend to hijack this thread, so feel free not to answer or to answer via PM, but I'm curious as to how you completely disable forums, conversations, etc.
Yeah XF actually has a nice web framework that you can use to build a lot of other things, its quite impressive. I like their plugin system a lot, I develop a software myself too and I've decided to develop an addon/plugin system similar to how XF handles it, which gives me a lot of inspirations on how to design a proper plugin system.
 
For the record, my original suggestion wasn't to do anything drastic like make XenForo primarily a framework and then have the forums be a module/addon
FWIW, that's actually how it started.

Regarding the whole board/forum/site thing, there's a fine balance to be had, and I don't actually think we have it yet.

'Board' is definitely a throwback to the old BBS days, but it's slightly more descriptive than 'forum', which is variously applied both to a container for threads and also as the term for the entire community structure.

Referring to 'site' can be risky, when we have options that would effectively become 'turn off your site', when in fact it wouldn't do that at all unless the entire site was running under the XenForo framework.

🤔
 
FWIW, that's actually how it started.

Regarding the whole board/forum/site thing, there's a fine balance to be had, and I don't actually think we have it yet.

'Board' is definitely a throwback to the old BBS days, but it's slightly more descriptive than 'forum', which is variously applied both to a container for threads and also as the term for the entire community structure.

Referring to 'site' can be risky, when we have options that would effectively become 'turn off your site', when in fact it wouldn't do that at all unless the entire site was running under the XenForo framework.

🤔
For me, it’s not the admin side that is problematic… I know what the options mean. It’s more the stuff for users. You would be amazed at how many times I field support requests from users asking what or where the forum or board is because of a random default message they read. It’s typically how I find/replace those phrases (after someone on a non-forum site) asks about it.

Clearly it’s nothing catastrophic… more funny than anything when dealing with the users on sites with no forum, but using XenForo as a framework. 😀
 
You tease, come on, fess up :D
Cracking Up Lol GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
 
Top Bottom