XF default style vs. UI.X 2 style - still worth it?

[snoopy5]

Hi

I currently use on my forums XF1.5x always with the style of UI.X for XF1.5x and was very happy with it.

I will upgrade in 2019 from XF1.5x to XF2.1x. As far as I heard, the default Xenforo style did much improve over XF1.5x defaults style especially regarding responsive design.

My questions for those of you, who used UI.X in the past, is it still worth it to buy UI.X also for XF 2.1x or are the differences to the new default XF2.1x style not worth the extra costs?

Thanks

 

[Kirby]

We are using UI.X on some of our XF 1.5 forums and it's been a major PITA with every single minor upgrade, always had annoying issues.

With XF2 (we currently do have 9 XF 1.5, 4 XF 2.0 and 3 XF 2.1 productions forums) we've based our styles on the default style and so far I am extremely happy with that decision, maintenance has become so much easier.

 

[snoopy5]

How did the users react? Anything that they are missing from UI.X?

Any problems with responsive design in the default theme (especially for smartphone users)?

How easy is it to change colours etc. in the XF 2.x default style?

 

[Mr Lucky]

How easy is it to change colours etc. in the XF 2.x default style?

Incredibly easy.

It makes total sense to me to use a customised default style unless you know exactly what you want from a paid for style you can't otherwise get.

 

[Kirby]

How did the users react? Anything that they are missing from UI.X?

Overall the users are pretty happy with the software, though I should note that our XF 2.X forums are migrations from other forum software (vBulletin 4.2, phpBB 3.0 and WBB 3.0) so they never used XF 1.5 with UI.X

Any problems with responsive design in the default theme (especially for smartphone users)?

None that I am aware of.

How easy is it to change colours etc. in the XF 2.x default style?

As I am not a designer and normally don't have anything to do with design I can't really comment on that.
But given that our designers are very happy as well and are able to produce results much faster than it was the case with XF 1.5 I'd expect it to be pretty easy.

 

[imno007]

I'd think most of the reasons for using UI.X 2 with XF2 would be the same as the reasons for choosing to use UI.X 1 with XF1, unless all you really care about is responsive design. You should just look at the features offered with UI.X2 and ask yourself if there's anything there you'd personally miss. Would you miss any of the hundreds of extra style properties? Collapsible sidebars? An easy way to move the navigation to the sidebars? An easy way to order and style your nodes? Etc. If not, if you don't need or use any of those things or can implement them on your own, then stick with the default.

I will say that Kirby is at least partially right when it comes to updates. Because UI.X is so heavily modified, it's probably not something you want to get too invested in if you're an early adopter - meaning if you like to always update XF immediately rather than wait a day or two, or if you were wanting to jump in on the latest XF beta (and nothing else were holding you back, like addon's you also had to wait on to be updated).