TheBigK
Well-known member
I've been contacted by several webmasters about our experience of ditching Wordpress & switching over to full-blown xenForo powered website. Until a few months ago, we used to have WordPress in site's root and xenForo in /community/ directory. We switched over too 100% xenForo setup and I've become a happier webmaster since then.
The Problem:
I was a fan of WordPress and had convinced myself that our site needed a full-blown content management system (CMS). We had the setup for several years until I began finding a solution to integrate everything. Our users demanded that the comments made on WordPress posts didn't add to the overall points and they had no way to 'login' from WordPress. We tried the integration addons available and they are great - but we still could not achieve 100% integration that we wanted viz. Uniform look all over, Uniform User Experience, Login from WordPress, Comments Sync (addon solved this problem), Listing latest threads & resources in the sidebar, Uniform advertising management etc. The biggest problem of all was this: we were essentially creating content at two different places.
The Fix:
I was skeptical about using xenPorta because I thought it won't replace WordPress. I however decided to give it a try and found that all the features I was regularly using were addressed by xenPorta. All I needed was an 'article like look' & ability to define permissions to who can create content for our front page [We've a news blog and only dedicated authors are authorized to create content]. Everything else was optional.
Finally, I decided to make a switch - and in the process took a *very tough* decision of saying goodbye to all the backlinks (we had super cool backlinks from all the amazing sites). Jake Bunce confirmed that there was no way to setup 301s to the imported articles [ thanks to the URL structure we had on WordPress]. We imported ~4000+ articles to a separate forum on xenForo and it took only a few minutes to achieve a uniform look all over the site. We still use a default xF theme with a few customizations; so everything was a cakewalk.
Life After The Switch:
Even after losing so many back-links, our traffic remained unaffected and I'm no longer bothered about SEO, URLs, Technical Problems, Plugin Upgrades, Integration Issues, User Permissions et al. I can concentrate on creating content, interacting with members and growing business. We were able to launch a few totally cool initiatives and life's been awesome.
Hope:
I really hope that KAM will decide on launching an official CMS that gels with xenForo, just like xenPorta. Even if they don't, xenPorta has a great future.
I'm all open to questions you may have.
PS: I didn't proof-read the post. Ignore any typos/grammar mistakes.
The Problem:
I was a fan of WordPress and had convinced myself that our site needed a full-blown content management system (CMS). We had the setup for several years until I began finding a solution to integrate everything. Our users demanded that the comments made on WordPress posts didn't add to the overall points and they had no way to 'login' from WordPress. We tried the integration addons available and they are great - but we still could not achieve 100% integration that we wanted viz. Uniform look all over, Uniform User Experience, Login from WordPress, Comments Sync (addon solved this problem), Listing latest threads & resources in the sidebar, Uniform advertising management etc. The biggest problem of all was this: we were essentially creating content at two different places.
The Fix:
I was skeptical about using xenPorta because I thought it won't replace WordPress. I however decided to give it a try and found that all the features I was regularly using were addressed by xenPorta. All I needed was an 'article like look' & ability to define permissions to who can create content for our front page [We've a news blog and only dedicated authors are authorized to create content]. Everything else was optional.
Finally, I decided to make a switch - and in the process took a *very tough* decision of saying goodbye to all the backlinks (we had super cool backlinks from all the amazing sites). Jake Bunce confirmed that there was no way to setup 301s to the imported articles [ thanks to the URL structure we had on WordPress]. We imported ~4000+ articles to a separate forum on xenForo and it took only a few minutes to achieve a uniform look all over the site. We still use a default xF theme with a few customizations; so everything was a cakewalk.
Life After The Switch:
Even after losing so many back-links, our traffic remained unaffected and I'm no longer bothered about SEO, URLs, Technical Problems, Plugin Upgrades, Integration Issues, User Permissions et al. I can concentrate on creating content, interacting with members and growing business. We were able to launch a few totally cool initiatives and life's been awesome.
Hope:
I really hope that KAM will decide on launching an official CMS that gels with xenForo, just like xenPorta. Even if they don't, xenPorta has a great future.
I'm all open to questions you may have.
PS: I didn't proof-read the post. Ignore any typos/grammar mistakes.
I've been thinking of moving away from Wordpress but have quite a lot of useful content on it.
