XenForo - Welcome to the forum world!!

[Rob]

Hi guys - It's great to see some familiar faces around here and refreshing to see who is behind XenForo - I will most definitely be watching this project very closely and I truly love what I am seeing so far.

Professional forum software these days needs to be lean, mean and above all SEO friendly - it should be a joy to use for the user, bandwidth saving for the forum owner and extensible, which sure seems the case with XenForo so far - I hope the plugin system is as breezy and would like to see plugin browsing and installation possible from within the admin backend itself rather than a manual process of visiting a .org site and downloading files, installing manually, etc - I've seen non forum software with this ability and a high calibre forum software deserves this feature.

I have a wish list of features that would help many forum owners who need to monetize and offer value to sponsors, etc :-

• Integrated banner ad system that allows permission based targeting.
• Ability to include PHP pages in the node tree, or to allow a way of inserting PHP into the 'page' content type. An admin can then build bespoke pages with custom functionality and include these value added pages in the node tree to benefit from permissions control.
• Custom profile fields and granular control over where these are shown in profile, postbit, etc
• Hot-Words - a fantastic feature to use in monetisation - admin defined hot words or hot phrases will automatically turn to links wherever they appear in posts, blogs, pages, etc -- ability to turn off auto-linking per node would be useful.
• For the 'page' content type then the ability to turn on commenting, rating, etc per page. I think another touch would be the option to allow anybody to edit any page (for admin set pages only) - each change will create a new revision and can show immediately, or not, based on moderation rules. This feature can help drive wiki type projects, documentation, social publications, etc
• Per Forums / Category / Node sponsors - I think this is an important one and perhaps can be integrated into the banner ad system.
• Admin set substitute / replacement for phrases 'New Thread' and 'New Reply' - this can be specified on a per forum basis.
• Admin defined extra thread fields per forum
• Admin defined Forum Display, ThreadBits, ShowThread and Postbit templates and options to hide post elements - all per forum. This allows forum owners to define how a forum area functons and can suit many uses.
• Forum Rules System - Admins can define additional 'rules' at a forum, category or Node level

Getting all of the above would be a dream, take and leave as you will but I think all those features combined will allow any monetiser a great degree of flexibility as well as giving them tools to carve out unique forum areas which can look and function in a uniquely different way.


Anyhooo, it's great to be here and I'll be around. Hi to everyone I know

 

[Eric J.]

Lol, wow, what an entry message. Well, I honestly don't know about a couple of your suggestions, but then again a couple make sense, so I'll just let you roll with that.

 

[Rob]

Lol, wow, what an entry message. Well, I honestly don't know about a couple of your suggestions, but then again a couple make sense, so I'll just let you roll with that.

Hiya! Which ones don't you know about?

 

[Erik]

While some of these are good, some of them could really be relegated to plugins. On behalf of those who do not need to monetize their forum (at least right away), I don't want my software to become too bloated.

 

[Brandon_R]

With the plugins system i hear xF will have, most of them can be created quite easily.

 

[Floris]

Excellent post with great suggestions Hi Rob

 

[Forsaken]

A lot of these features I've added with modifications, and it would be nice to see at least some of them added.

I don't think many of them will be however.

 

[Rob]

Excellent post with great suggestions Hi Rob

Haha... I knew you would be around these parts - nice to see you Floris!

Im not saying ALL these things should be included, but as a software which is pitching into the professional forum arena it will need to give a better level of control and monetisation opportunities for serious owners above what other software offers. Right now the serious forum owners are in limbo because vB 4 was not a viable upgrade path - for me personally it's more of a downgrade which is why I'm still on the vB 3 branch with a site I need to upgrade, or migrate when either option is feasible.

 

[welshstew]

Moning Rob

 

[Rob]

Moning Rob

Ahh.... Hi Stew! Tis good around these parts huh. What do you think of the suggestions above?