Very interested, but some worries

[Naatan]

Hi, I've been researching many different forum solutions and have currently boiled it down to Vanilla Forums, IPB and XenForo.. XenForo is definitely at the top of that list but (as with the other ones) I have some worries.

First, for all the themes I've seen available for XenForo they pretty much ALL seem to follow the exact same wireframe, leading me to believe that the templates themselves are either not very customisable, or customising them would break integration with certain backend features so people opt not to do it. Can anyone enlighten me on this?

Second, and this is more a question than a worry, I am looking to use Wordpress as the main repository for users to login and register, I then just want to carry over that session to XenForo. Now I'm a senior developer with years of experience in web development so I have no doubt I'll be able to pull this off.. but I'm wondering whether XenForo itself offers an interface for SSO, or whether I'll need to basically hack my way through? In either case, can anyone inform me of the complexity involved in doing this?

And last, I'm looking for a solution that can scale well, the project I'm on will likely have thousands upon thousands of visitors (millions if all goes well, but they might not all visit the forums) and I'm simply wondering how XenForo can scale with such large communities. Seeing as it's a rather new project I would imagine that scalability might not be on your radar yet.

Thanks in advance for anyone taking the time to read/answer my questions.

 

[Pro]

I really like the wordpress bridge, and using wordpress as a CMS. My users that aren't as experienced with moderating tools can create articles and move around the site better, and with the xenscript add-on, its just that much better. All of that combined with bambua's XenDynamic and you are good to go.

 

[mrGTB]

A full blown CMS isnt actually a requirement for all, however the ability to aggregate excerpts of articles from different categories onto a homepage is a basic need. In my opinion, the pages functionality in xenforo isnt *that far* away from being able to handle this. Of course, Im aware a fully featured CMS is not coming to xenForo any time soon but I do think that basic barriers to switching could be removed with just a little focus on pages functionality improvements.

This came up ages ago about taking the PAGES further towards being a fully blown CMS. However, Kier did make it clear at the time it was never designed or intended to go much further past what it is already. I'm guessing he meant there are limitation with how far it can actually be taken. With that thinking in mind, plus it would seem silly to have both Pages and a CMS there. Maybe at some point the best option might be to do a re-think about "removing pages feature completely", replaced with a CMS system more people will use?