Why we ditched wordpress & switched to xenForo [ & xenPorta ]

[Fred Sherman]

I'd like to see Xenforo create a fully user customizable CMS. Have it come with a full set of widgets and let the user define his screen to be what he/she wants instead of a one size fits all approach.

 

[TheBigK]

Where is this BBcode add-on ?

This: http://xenforo.com/community/resources/tinymce-quattro-and-its-wysiwyg-bbcodes.1881/

 

[craigiri]

My slight fear of dumping WP is for SEO. I know, I know, it shouldn't matter....but get this....

On my drone site, despite there being good content in the forums and in WP (WP is the front page, etc.), the Forums currently get about 1/10th of the page views!

It may be that, once I dump WP, google will pick up whatever front page portal I use and run with it. But it's definitely a gamble, IMHO.

The WP part of the site was up for about two years (I've had it only 9 months). The Forum has been up about 6 months.....still, both are integrated in various ways, so all things being equal goog should be sending a lot more people to land in my XF pages.

Again, it might be because goog is a bit old fashioned and likes WP and the two year old foundation....

 

[Teapot]

Again, it might be because goog is a bit old fashioned and likes WP and the two year old foundation....

I think it's that to a slight degree, but I also think it's because most visitors come, admire, and flee. Forums are generally not as attractive to peruse for first-time visitors, they tend to prefer the more structured content of the blog. What I've found is that integrating the news system more deeply - we moved from Joomla/phpBB to pure XenForo - tends to get people following the links. And since XenForo then makes it easy to interact with this structured content, you win all around.

 

[Walter]

My slight fear of dumping WP is for SEO. I know, I know, it shouldn't matter....but get this....

My experience is not with Wordpress but consider this:

In 2013 I converted a non forum site from pure HTML to Xenforo pages. For every "example_page.html" I created a Xenforo page with exactly the same name "example_page" (URL Portion in Xenforo = "example_page"). Then I carefully created 301 redirects from the .html file to the page (this was possible because the new page has the same name as the html file). Something similar should be done when converting from WP.

The conversion not only was a success, I was astonished - the traffic since then has doubled, something I never expected. I still don't know why. And no, there were no major links added or other optimizations.

I know Google loves WP. But obviously Google also loves Xenforo

 

[jauburn]

I'm all open to questions you may have.

Thank you for sharing this. Experience sharing like this is terribly valuable.

 

[Allan]

The ability to create articles (editorial) I miss her terribly on xenPorta.

If with xenPorta, we could do this, it would be great

I think we can do it with wordpress

 

[jauburn]

If with xenPorta, we could do this, it would be great

I'm not sure what your "this" refers to exactly, but I find that page incredibly ugly, busy, slow, and off-putting. I haven't used xenPorta, but if it had the option to put up a page like that, I'd turn it off.

 

[Allan]

I'm not sure what your "this" refers to exactly, but I find that page incredibly ugly, busy, slow, and off-putting. I haven't used xenPorta, but if it had the option to put up a page like that, I'd turn it off.

Tastes and colors ....