XF2 [8WR] XenPorta 2 (Portal) PRO

XF2 [8WR] XenPorta 2 (Portal) PRO [Paid] 2.2.0.7

No permission to buy ($40.00)
Overview FAQ Updates (30) Reviews (27) History Discussion
LenKaiser said:
WOW! Ok interesting response for customers! Incidentally, I was able to solve the issue myself without the FAQ and obviously without your valued help. I can assure you that I will no longer suggest your add-ons to any clients in the future.
Click to expand...

The thing is, people don't realize that he owns a forum (probably a busy bee) which he developed these add-ons for. Of course, he shared these add-ons with the community for a few dollars. The support needed to install the add-on is all there in his FAQ. Any additional support in his response is you will have to figure it out yourself i.e styling and customizations. Which I completely understand. But the lack of support in general from him is poor especially if you are going to release an add-on with a big community because you are going to get customers and those customers are going to require that kind of support, some more than others. This unfortunately is inevitable.
 
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I gave 40$ for a "crippled" addon. I want the articles to be auto-promoted. Developer should not decide what his customers will do with their servers. I run a dedicated machine and I don't have the time to promote articles manually. I need them to "click and forget".
 
For future reference (since I didn't get a response to my earlier question), to fix issues with an externalDataUrl and feature images I changed the method getImage in Entity/Feature.php to

PHP: 
public function getImage()
{
    $image = 'data://features/'.$this->thread_id.'.jpg';

    if (\XF\Util\File::abstractedPathExists($image))
    {
        return $this->app()->applyExternalDataUrl('features/'.$this->thread_id.'.jpg');
    }
    
    return "styles/8wayrun/porta/_feature.jpg";
}

This will construct the proper url for feature images.
 
There are three extra things I'd like from this add-on if possible.

1) The ability to promote pages to "featured" content, so I can link from the slider to important pages. At the moment I can only feature forum threads.
2) Option to remove the box with the date from the article excerpts (the date is already above the topic anyway).
3) Remove breadcrumb from all Xenporta pages.

That would make the XF/XP combo perfect as a cms for my site.
 
I have one suggestion that I'd like to float.

Currently, you can assign an icon image via avatar, tags, or attachment.

I think it would be pretty cool if there was a 4th option...either a way to paste in a custom external URL or give us the ability to upload a series of generic filler/boilerplate images. This would all be for the purpose of featuring an interesting forum post by giving it an image, even if no images are associated with the OP.

I'll give you an example.

I have a paranormal/supernatural forum. Let's say someone makes a post about how they just experienced a ghost in their house, but it's their own personal story--so no photos are added to the post. Let's say another person creates a post about how they just witnessed a UFO. Again, no pics associated with this post, but the post is cool enough for me to want to promote it so it gets the attention it deserves on the XenPorta home page.

Well, since there are no photos associated with either posts, I'd still like to give them some attention by assigning a generic stock photo to each post. For example, I can easily find a generic stock photo of a ghost and a UFO. I'd like to "link" the ghost pic to the ghost post and the UFo pic to the UFO post, even though neither photo is otherwise associated with the post.

In other words, if I want a post to be promoted to an article (so that it shows up on XenPorta) and it has no photo, I'd like to create a gallery of generic stock photos for each category/subforum/etc that I could assign to that featured post.
 
I'm having issues when a post is featured as an article, it changes the board meta when I look a day later on Google. The setting for XenPorta2 for setting the meta is blank, so it should not affect the xenforo meta?
187358
 
Hi Jaxel,
I see that you can set the URL portion to articles/ or blog/ via Route Filters which is great. However I noticed that clicking through to individual articles will change the link to /thread/thread-name.xx/

For continuity, I also added another Route Filter: threads/ -> articles/ which will keep everything uniform, which works fine until trying to edit any article on the frontend, which then throws an error:
The requested page could not be found. (Code: invalid_action, controller: EWR\Porta:Article, action: ArticleEdit)

I'm assuming messing with the /threads/ portion of the URL is messing up some functions.

Is there a way to remedy this so we can have full control over the URL structure? Would really love to keep this simple hierarchy:
.com/articles/
.com/articles/categories/category-name/
.com/articles/article-about-blah.xx/
 
whitesky said:
Hi Jaxel,
I see that you can set the URL portion to articles/ or blog/ via Route Filters which is great. However I noticed that clicking through to individual articles will change the link to /thread/thread-name.xx/

For continuity, I also added another Route Filter: threads/ -> articles/ which will keep everything uniform, which works fine until trying to edit any article on the frontend, which then throws an error:
The requested page could not be found. (Code: invalid_action, controller: EWR\Porta:Article, action: ArticleEdit)

I'm assuming messing with the /threads/ portion of the URL is messing up some functions.

Is there a way to remedy this so we can have full control over the URL structure? Would really love to keep this simple hierarchy:
.com/articles/
.com/articles/categories/category-name/
.com/articles/article-about-blah.xx/
Click to expand...
Yesss I would like to see this too.

But just to warn you if you don’t alrwady know, changing the threads/ route filter will effect every other thread on the forums other than those listed as articles.
 
JoyFreak said:
Yesss I would like to see this too.

But just to warn you if you don’t alrwady know, changing the threads/ route filter will effect every other thread on the forums other than those listed as articles.
Click to expand...
Thanks didn't even occur to me when I wrote it :oops:. Perhaps there's a way Jaxel can implement this behind the scenes so it takes on another format..?

Another idea is would it be possible to trick the breadcrumb into displaying the XenPorta structure, instead of Forums -> Category -> Thread Name etc.

As XenPorta is the closest we've had to a CMS for Xenforo since XF1, I'd really love to separate out articles/CMS-type content on my sites from the forum as much as possible. I know for some site owners this isn't a real biggie, but it would be great to have a bit more control over conveying a distinction between the two to visitors.
 
whitesky said:
Thanks didn't even occur to me when I wrote it :oops:. Perhaps there's a way Jaxel can implement this behind the scenes so it takes on another format..?

Another idea is would it be possible to trick the breadcrumb into displaying the XenPorta structure, instead of Forums -> Category -> Thread Name etc.

As XenPorta is the closest we've had to a CMS for Xenforo since XF1, I'd really love to separate out articles/CMS-type content on my sites from the forum as much as possible. I know for some site owners this isn't a real biggie, but it would be great to have a bit more control over conveying a distinction between the two to visitors.
Click to expand...

I totally agree and I’m sure a lot would be happy to see this but we are dealing with Jaxel here lol. So expect a reply in a long time and probably a no too. Probably more hope in a new cms add on being developed in the near future.
 
So after doing a lot of testing in XenPorta 2, figured I'd leave a bunch of suggestions together here. As a note up front on why I'm making this post:

Between clients and myself, I'm looking to move at least four medium to large websites off of other platforms (one vBulletin, two Wordpress, and one XF1) and onto Xenforo 2 in the next few months. All of them will need at least a fairly robust content management solution for their existing articles or member generated content. As of right now, there's a few aspects of XenPorta 2 which would make this either not very ideal, or not work at all in its current format.

Disclaimer: The following suggestions are based on the scenario where site owners wish to have a very article heavy website, with clear organization between articles and forum discussion. I do understand this scenario is not a necessity for 100% of admins.

URL Structure

As mentioned in an earlier post, it would be great to have more control over URL hierarchy if possible. I know there are some limitations with how Xenforo works in this area.

How XenPorta works now:
(the following assumes the user has added a Route Filter changing 'ewr-porta/' to 'articles/')
.com/articles/
--> .com/articles/categories/health-fitness/
----> .com/threads/article-name-here.xx/

Traditional Hierarchical URL Structure
.com/articles/
--> .com/articles/categories/health-fitness/
----> .com/articles/health-fitness/article-name-here.xx/

Typically it's desired to use such a structure to not only benefit user flow but for SEO & content organization.

It's also great for site owners who wish to have a bit more divide between article content, and forum discussion. Which leads me to...

Page Flow & Duplicate Content

This one, for me, is the major one which I'd love to see changed!

Currently, when you click on a XenPorta category via the main article index, it will take you to the category list page (so far so good). Then when clicking on an individual article, it will take you to that article (ok.). However, as the article is rendered within the forum but just with an article-type layout, clicking on the breadcrumb back to your category name will now take you to the forum category instead. This completely breaks user flow and will suddenly drop the reader in an area they were not in before. Screenshot examples (I've setup some dummy categories for this):

Page Flow

188169 188170 188171 188172

This leaves no clear indication for a visitor of what just happened or where they're at. Suddenly they are in a forum category and have no clear way to get back to the articles list they were just in. Also, as the template has changed, there is also a different sidebar with potentially different widgets. At very best the site owner can duplicate the XenPorta and Forum Category List widgets exactly the same, but this isn't an ideal solution. Also, the navigation tab and breadcrumb changes which leaves more confusion for the visitor.

I can see if users are XF junkies or are very familar with XenPorta itself, this may not be a huge issue. But for general sites attracting traffic for article content, this can be very confusing, and can't be accomplished via Route Filters.

Duplicate Content

Another issue is that this leaves tons of duplicate content if the site owners wishes to organize their articles. I feel this is bad not only for user experience, but SEO as well, as the URL's for each will have the same titles & keywords.

Examples:
188173

Lots of similar links:
188174

This leaves the choice, what will be the definitive location for this content? Where should the user really go to find what they're looking for? I don't feel leaving both is a good idea. So how to give the visitors (and Google) a clear indication of where they're at, and how the site is organized?

Temporary solution: Hide nodes & change forum tab location

188175

This will at least rid the categories from the Forums from a UI perspective, so visitors will only encounter these categories and access their content via the Articles section (XenPorta).

This is an ok mid-solution, however it still leaves the issue of page flow again, where clicking through to an article will lead the user back to the forum category via the forum breadcrumb/template. It may be even more confusing as they are now in a forum category which actually doesn't show up on the forum index at all.

Widgets

This final suggestion is purely aesthetic and just my interesting touch. I feel that a few more Latest Article/Thread layouts would be great.

Recent articles widget but with featured image icon instead of avatar:
188176

Traditional recent blocks layout:
188177

These examples are pretty common on most any modern web layout but aren't found in XF/XenPorta. Creating them requires either custom addons, or extensive template customizations and/or widget definitions which can get messy once things start getting updated.

I would even be willing to help design and do rough UI/HTML/CSS for anything like these, no credits wanted either.

Conclusion

I'd just like to wrap up by reiterating that I understand, not everyone may care about or need these suggestions. I do leave these after about 13 years of administrating sites across nearly a dozen platforms (Joomla, phpBB, Wordpress, vB and many others) so these stem from a general aim to produce good user flow and experience.

Personally for me, the page flow issue is the biggest one and will likely require me holding off on converting several websites. But in the meantime, this is currently all we have for a CMS solution and I don't feel Xenforo staff is interested in an official addon at this time.

If anyone does find these valuable, feel free to like my post - most importantly, for Jaxel to know. I realize his development time would be best spent on areas which would be useful for many people.
 
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