Digitalpoint now running xenforo!!

I had a sneak peek at this the other day and I'll have to say this is damn sexy.
Have you guys seen @digitalpoint made the switch to xenforo..
https://forums.digitalpoint.com

 

Saw it earlier. Looks pretty good, but it seems really, really slow for me (as in, the page takes quite a while to load).

 

Looks really good. The whole Marketplace interface is sleek...be interesting to see what he does with it going forward.

 

It would be interesting to see how the traffic and posts behavior changes from vb to xf.

This is the ultimate case study.

 

It'll be interesting to see if this has any affect on their activity or community. I guess Shawn got tired of using vBulletin.

 

Oh, I sure wish Shawn would come and answer that question of "why the move to XF" himself. I know the answer, but I am not going to speak for him. But I will say, the reasons for the move are much more significant than just being tired of using the vBulletin software.

Scott

 

No one who is sane *wants* to migrate to a different platform. Especially when you have to write so much custom code to do so.

We migrated out of necessity really. vBulletin is not bad software, but it's a bunch of little pieces cobbled together and built upon a really old framework (there are some things from vB2 in there I think). Our migrating is because we needed something that I felt was a viable platform/framework to build stuff upon in the future. I also don't care that much about what XenForo will/won't do in the future. What I needed was a solid, well designed framework with the future in mind... XenForo is that today. The features I think it's missing, I just built myself.

 

Personally, it's sad to see Shawn switch to XF but understand you choose what best suits your own situation. Very appreciative of all the feedback, improvement suggestions and bug reports for vB over the years

So what happens with the future of your vB4 Sphinx search plugin ?

 

Except the theme i like all the customization done there but i read Shawn saying he will be working on the theme part soon.

 

Maybe AnimeBoards.com will be next to convert!

 

heh

 

And congrats on what looks like a fairly successful migration. I still think it is a sad course of events that vBulletin customers large and small are even having to face this choice of sit and wait until possibly vBulletin is great again or to just migrate to a different system. But then again, the situation poses as a chance for a change possibly for the better.

Also Shawn, please correct me if I am wrong and for the sake of clarity to those also thinking about migrating away from vBulletin, the tons of coding you had to do to migrate was to basically rework the special services/ apps your site offers its members, like the Market Place, which BTW, looks pretty sharp. So your case is a bit special, when it comes to the complexity of the migration. Normal vBulletin users wouldn't have such an enormous effort to migrate to a different system. Is that correct?

Scott

 

Once Shawn has time to release his addons and changes, this should make it much easier to convert from vB to XF. Shawn has obviously added everything that XF was missing. So now its possible to migrate to XF without loosing data and functionality.

Once this functionality is available to everyone, XenForo has matured.

Quite a lot of webmasters have found XenForo to be lacking feature-wise. Shawn seems to have brought XenForo on par with vBulletin feature wise. This is a major change in the forum software landscape. While the law suit cripples official XF development and makes the switch to XF very dangerous/unreliable, this change should still turn quite a few heads.

vb3/vb4 now no longer has better functionality than XF.

 

It's a fairly mature/stable product... Haven't needed to update it for anything in more than a year as it is. I'll continue to support it.

Well yeah... Obviously the more custom stuff you have built for any platform, the more work it is to switch platforms. The same can be said of a vB4 -> vB5 migration since everything needs to be reworked. I mean look at vb.org... Not that it doesn't work fine, but they are still on vB3 mainly because no one wants to rewrite all their custom stuff.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves here... There are still things that I borderline hate about XF and vB is definitely better (for example the editor).

 

Yeah, the TinyMCE editor sucks big time. CKE is much better IMO. (not counting IPS its implementation of CKE)

None the less: the functionality you added is a major leap ahead for XF. How many addons did you add to XF to get digitalpoint where it is now?

I see that you have installed the xenforo resource manager. That looks very nice. Did you modify the resource manager?

 

If i had his talents or the money to pay someone to bring the things i think XF is missing i'd be using XF myself....but it is a no go for me. But Digital Point looks so much more modern now and I really do enjoy the conversion and what has been done. Best wishes to Shawn!

 

This many...



A few things I didn't register as add-ons since they do nothing on the web side of things... like I made a CLI Tools addons for rebuilding search indexes and caches.

My custom importer is all CLI based, etc.

I also ended up rolling a ton of small things into one "Little Things" addon to consolidate things that I knew would never be released and small enough to not warrant having their own addon.

It's not the XenForo resource manager... I built it from scratch.

It's a mix of a filtering tool for sites/domains for sale... for example: https://marketplace.digitalpoint.com/sites

And the other side of it is a digital goods marketplace (it handles payments, licensing, distribution, multi-tiered pricing, built in optional affiliate program for sellers, etc.) Which is kind of like the XF resource manager in a way... but it's not a catch all for resources... it's really just digital items you want to sell.

 

Interesting to say the least. I much like your marketplace addon. I would much like to have a look at the code at some point.

Many of these addons are very interesting.

 

Wow...just wow!

Scott

 

I really like the switch. I've seen posts previously that said it was coming, so it wasn't a huge shock and I'm already a member of quite a few xf forums, so I'm already familiar with the software.