xenForo Portal?

[Fish]

Hello,

I'm looking at purchasing a xenForo license. I'm wanting to build a community site, where the primary focus is the forums, but I'd also like a portal page where various widgets can be placed as well as having the ability to "promote" forum posts as front-page news.

Similar to these two sites:

http://wildstar-central.com/
http://www.alttabme.com/


Is that feature built into xenForo or does a portal such as that require an addon? If so, which would you recommend for the greatest flexibility?

 

[Dan]

OK, the quick answer is... Yes, if you give the permission to the "Registered" usergroup then it forces the Thread Tools link to display with only one option in it. Below is a screen capture of how it appears. One caveat is that granting the permission also means that they can also remove items from the portal page meaning that if User A promoted something then User B can remote it.

Might be worth it to split permissions, can promote and can delete

 

[Martok]

We actually coded Simple Portal with this in mind. You can promote a private or "premium" thread to the portal. If used with the character limit, when a user who does not have permission to see the thread clicks on Read more, it will redirect to a no permission page, allowing the admin to show previews of premium content but not allow the full article to be shown. Hope that makes sense.

Thanks, it does. XenPorta does the same so maybe why Jaxel coded it this way.

 

[Kevin]

We actually coded Simple Portal with this in mind. You can promote a private or "premium" thread to the portal. If used with the character limit, when a user who does not have permission to see the thread clicks on Read more, it will redirect to a no permission page, allowing the admin to show previews of premium content but not allow the full article to be shown. Hope that makes sense.

That does indeed make sense and, thinking about it, I could see how it might be useful for some scenarios.

 

[Kevin]

Might be worth it to split permissions, can promote and can delete

At least for me, personally, it is a not a concern because for the site(s) I have in mind only staff would be controlling what gets promoted but for the usage Martok has in mind, of allowing the Registered group to promote, it might be handy to avoid 'user thread promotion wars'.

 

[Dan]

At least for me, personally, it is a not a concern because for the site(s) I have in mind only staff would be controlling what gets promoted but for the usage Martok has in mind, of allowing the Registered group to promote, it might be handy to avoid 'user thread promotion wars'.

Never even considered allowing registered group to promote to portal to be honest. IMHO it would create exactly what you are saying. Normally, you as an admin would want full control over what is being shown on the "cover" of your site. After all, it is the first impression of your site. With you on this Kevin.

 

[Martok]

Just to clarify, I don't allow the registered group to promote, it's a smaller 'full members' group (think of it as a premium group). If this group gets large in the future then a more select subset would have promotion permissions. The point is, I require more than just staff to be able to promote, and both XenPorta and Simple Portal allow this.

 

[SelfSufficientMe]

For a stripped-down bare-bones portal page that can you extend onto I'd say look at Simple Portal + Widget Framework.

I'm looking for something light so perhaps this might be a better option for me.

 

[SelfSufficientMe]

We actually coded Simple Portal with this in mind. You can promote a private or "premium" thread to the portal. If used with the character limit, when a user who does not have permission to see the thread clicks on Read more, it will redirect to a no permission page, allowing the admin to show previews of premium content but not allow the full article to be shown. Hope that makes sense.

This is a top feature!

 

[erich37]

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/cover-page-for-guests-aka-home-page.13404/

 

[Deepmartini]

Yeah, coded poorly, caused my site to error out a few times an hour because of it....even after multiple modifications to the core files.

So Xenporta doesn't scale for big sites? Does Simple Portal scale effectively with no errors?

 

[Digital Doctor]

After 1.2 comes out, you'll be able to create a Page and set it as the main landing page.

That would be HTML pages.

 

[Forsaken]

So Xenporta doesn't scale for big sites? Does Simple Portal scale effectively with no errors?

As far as I know, Azzid didn't like the way Simple Portal looked or worked and is going to use another option.

 

[Sheratan]

And I'm still looking for portal in the root and xenforo in subdomain.

 

[Morgain]

And I'm still looking for portal in the root and xenforo in subdomain.

Looks like 1.2 might do that

 

[Jeremy]

Looks like 1.2 might do that

If you are thinking of the route changer, no, it won't. Mike's stated that it only works in the same directory of XenForo since it uses the current system and just adds a step in between request received and responding.

 

[Andrej]

If you are thinking of the route changer, no, it won't. Mike's stated that it only works in the same directory of XenForo since it uses the current system and just adds a step in between request received and responding.

I think this is what Morgain hinted at...

Setting custom routes as the index
The index page (that is, what is currently at http://xenforo.com/community/) can now be set to any route URL. By default, this will be the forum list, but you could set this to resources, a portal page, or something else entirely. If you do change it, the forum list will automatically be located athttp://xenforo.com/community/forums/.

 

[Jeremy]

I think this is what Morgain hinted at...

Yes, and as I stated above, Mike said this won't be possible:

To people asking what's possible, think about how it works. It works on the "route" part of the URL. Here that's the part immediately after http://xenforo.com/community/; if we didn't have friendly URLs enabled, it'd be afterhttp://xenforo.com/community/index.php?.

When a link is generated by XenForo, we look at the route filters and do a replacement on that URL before outputting it to the HTML. What you enter in the find box will automatically match from the start of the route (threads/route-filters.47946/page-3). If it matches, it'll be replaced by the replace box. The URL will still be prefixed by the xenforo.com/community/(index.php?) part, so you can't override that.

The constraints are that the find and replace entries must both start with a "prefix", basically one or more alphanumeric or dash characters. You can use placeholders to do find/replaces (after the prefix) bit, but the only thing you have access to is what's in the URL already. If you want to make hierarchical URLs, you'd have to define that for every URL that you want to change. (And obviously, there is some performance overhead for filters - it's the same for every feature really.)

When reading a URL and figuring out where it goes, we do the opposite: find the "replace" and replace it with the "find". The rules are the same: it replaces at the start of the route part. This is then passed to XenForo as normal, so we simply see the standard routes internally.


You can create conflicts or route filters that disable access to other routes. A good example would be replacing threads/ with forums/. You'd simply disable access to any forum view pages (like the thread list), because that URL would be turned into threads/forum-name.1/.

It works after you enter into the XenForo system, not server side.