Very interested in Xenforo. Couple questions

[Panupat]

1. I give skinning very high priority. How is skinning in Xenforo? Will I be able to play with skinning before I purchase? Is there a demo I can do that? I'm not talking about just changing colors but possibly wrapping the whole thing in my own wrapper, replaced the menu with my own, move things around or even change the layout.

2. How easy is it to pull bits and pieces from the forum to be displayed on other page? Currently my portal page is made with concrete5 CMS. It has it's own content area generated by the CMS and also areas that are pulling threads/thumbnails/attachments from IP.Board. Will I be able to achieve similar output with Xenforo?

Here's my homepage - http://www.all-final.com/home

3. Is there a converter to convert IP.Board 3.1.4 to Xenforo's?

 

[Russ]

1.) Skinning is probably the easiest I've come across in a forum software in quite sometime. There's no demo out currently but I suggest checking out a couple things:

• http://xfstop.com/stylechooser.html - Demo of some styles out for XF
• http://xenforo.com/community/forums/have-you-seen/

The have you seen gives some video responses or good guides on certain aspects of XenForo including XenForo.

2.) I believe someone is working on a mod to do somewhat of what you're asking:
http://xenforo.com/community/threads/forumconnector.8176/
But I'll leave this for someone else to answer this a bit better .

3.) Currently not a converter for IPB 3.1.4 however it has been mentioned that more converters will be coming down the road. Right now you'd have to convert to vB, then to XenForo.

 

[Shelley]

Regarding the skinning not only is it the easiest but without doubt the best style system out of any product. It's constantly being improved and even far back as beta 1 the system was in a class of it's own. So with regards to the style system it's something you won't have to worry about.

 

[Anthony Parsons]

You can custom skin it without touching a template...

 

[steven s]

As others have said, skinning is fairly simple.
You can either edit the color scheme from one page or go into individual templates and you will see separate css files for each.
It really is easy. Like anything new, there is a learning curve. I'm finding it fairly intuitive.
Plus the peer-to-peer support is excellent!

As far as converting, I'm sure someone here would be willing to import your forum to vBulletin v3 so you can import into XenForo.