What’s the Best Way to Build an Article or Blog-Style Website Using XenForo?

Johnadam

Johnadam

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I'm planning to launch a content-focused website and I'm considering using XenForo as the platform. Most examples I've seen are traditional discussion forums, but I would like to create something that feels more like a modern blog or online magazine, with articles, categories, featured posts, and strong SEO capabilities.

Has anyone successfully built an article or blog-based site on XenForo? Are there any recommended add-ons, themes, or best practices to make XenForo function more like a CMS while still taking advantage of its community features?

I'd also love to hear about any real-world examples of websites using XenForo primarily for publishing content rather than running a standard forum. Any advice or experiences would be greatly appreciated.
 
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Johnadam said:
Has anyone successfully built an article or blog-based site on XenForo? Are there any recommended add-ons, themes, or best practices to make XenForo function more like a CMS while still taking advantage of its community features?
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Did you search these forums? There are quite a couple of add ons that make this possible and also combinations of WordPress with XenForo. Also, a lot of pages on the web using one of these approaches. Searching for "Blog", "Portal" or "CMS" in this forum should be a good starting point.
 
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Obligated AMS plug

xenaddons.com

Article Management System

AMS is designed for forum owners to provide an interface for their members to draft and publish Articles and article like content. Supported XenForo Branch: XF 2.3 Available Unsupported XenForo Branches: XF 1.x, XF 2.0, XF 2.1, XF 2.2 Your standard...
xenaddons.com xenaddons.com

AMS is fantastic and offers the most control over your content.
 
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Johnadam said:
I'd also love to hear about any real-world examples of websites using XenForo primarily for publishing content rather than running a standard forum. Any advice or experiences would be greatly appreciated.
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I have used addons and i still recommend using default xenForo itself. We publish like 500 articles a day and it works really great.

Johnadam said:
Has anyone successfully built an article or blog-based site on XenForo? Are there any recommended add-ons, themes, or best practices to make XenForo function more like a CMS while still taking advantage of its community features?
Click to expand...
We just introduced new thread types and used that. Though the main problem still remain "URL Slugs" since in our case we just had to use it for publishing single type of content we just went with "example.com/a/article.id"

Rest if you need different slugs best use @Bob addons (xenaddons.com)
Johnadam said:
but I would like to create something that feels more like a modern blog or online magazine, with articles, categories, featured posts, and strong SEO capabilities.
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1781510577415.webp1781510835952.webp1781510890751.webp

One can definitely easily do it. This is default XF Forum without any addons.. Built it like 2 years ago. Just worked on theme and rest is default forum and thread types. Rest of things i think you should explore more based on your own requirements.
 
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JustinHawk said:
I have used addons and i still recommend using default xenForo itself. We publish like 500 articles a day and it works really great.


We just introduced new thread types and used that. Though the main problem still remain "URL Slugs" since in our case we just had to use it for publishing single type of content we just went with "example.com/a/article.id"

Rest if you need different slugs best use @Bob addons (xenaddons.com)

View attachment 339885View attachment 339887View attachment 339888

One can definitely easily do it. This is default XF Forum without any addons.. Built it like 2 years ago. Just worked on theme and rest is default forum and thread types. Rest of things i think you should explore more based on your own requirements.
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Why did you choose to do it via Xen vs WP?
 
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DigitalME said:
Why did you choose to do it via Xen vs WP?
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Security and XF is easy to manage. XenForo perform better than Wordpress and we can expand however we like for SEO and other things.

Everything in XF makes it easier for me to manage things as i have more experience in XF. Plus we get to have a community, when everyone is chasing AI but real value is still in community as that can build real trust for SEO.
 
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JustinHawk said:
Security and XF is easy to manage. XenForo perform better than Wordpress and we can expand however we like for SEO and other things.

Everything in XF makes it easier for me to manage things as i have more experience in XF. Plus we get to have a community, when everyone is chasing AI but real value is still in community as that can build real trust for SEO.
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What results are you seeing? uniques per day etc?
 
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DigitalME said:
What results are you seeing? uniques per day etc?
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Posted a long time ago. This all data is from the during the test.

JustinHawk

Post in thread 'Improving SEO to compete with older forum competitor'

RichDevman said:
No offense. They must have a great backlink profile and lots of activity.
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None taken! Website launched on April 1 and within days we were Ranking on Top Pages on Google. Zero Backlinks :}

1723700667939.webp
  • Like
JustinHawk

Post in thread 'Improving SEO to compete with older forum competitor'

I can help you with the SEO, Mostly Technical SEO. We have tried it so far on many clients website

The results for some are impressive as their organic traffic keeps on growing

1721370834296.webp

and some are just okay, it just doubled and stopped but they are at to top of their niche now.

1721370649218.webp

You can DM me if you are interested.

Though the important role here was all about research done for the segment of customers being targeted, nothing to do with software.
 
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JustinHawk said:
Posted a long time ago. This all data is from the during the test.

JustinHawk

Post in thread 'Improving SEO to compete with older forum competitor'

RichDevman said:
No offense. They must have a great backlink profile and lots of activity.
Click to expand...
None taken! Website launched on April 1 and within days we were Ranking on Top Pages on Google. Zero Backlinks :}

1723700667939.webp
  • Like
JustinHawk

Post in thread 'Improving SEO to compete with older forum competitor'

I can help you with the SEO, Mostly Technical SEO. We have tried it so far on many clients website

The results for some are impressive as their organic traffic keeps on growing

1721370834296.webp

and some are just okay, it just doubled and stopped but they are at to top of their niche now.

1721370649218.webp

You can DM me if you are interested.

Though the important role here was all about research done for the segment of customers being targeted, nothing to do with software.
Click to expand...

Yo bro!!! Hit me up sometime, would love to chat SEO and have you work on our forum.

Been doing SEO for ages, but on blog stuff, and happy to pitch in if you need a second opinion on anything. I'll DM ya.
 
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Experiment on free and low cost forums that have those things you want but have a licence here so you can migrate it over here.
Places like woltlab have all those things you want built in.
 
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The default XenForo contains an article style that I feel like is vastly under-utilized.

One of the nice things is that it's incorporated directly into the forums, which tends to be the main hub of the community. If you use an add-on like AMS (which is an excellent add-on, for the record, and one that I will disclose that I've subscribed to for many years), it's in a separate section of the community which leads to the silo effect. It's great if you have a large, robust site where the forums and articles need to be distinct, but I find that most new and starter and struggling communities tend to over-design their community.
 
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