Hi! I'd be grateful if someone can point me towards a good and reliable community platform. I have a gaming community running it on a latest vB. Although the site is somehow running now (I put a fair amount of money for various add ons and plugins), the site was rebuild on one of the poor commercial themes. Meaning that code behind is now so modified and fragile I really don't want to touch it more than necessary. Reading all this stuff about vB is really making me confident about my feelings towards vB 5. I don't like it from the day one. What I seek is a platform optimized for performance but has great abilities toward theme's customization. I run site on my private VPS and have plenty of resources but I still want it to be as optimized as possible out of the box. Next thing I need is a chatroom and google-ads friendly options. What I would really like to get (I doubt any platform has this option available out of the box) is option to have customized backgrounds (marketing friendly landing pages). Yes... that's basically it Thanks!
I would recommend you look at either IPB or xenforo. Staying with vbulletin would be delaying the inevitable.
That's exactly what I figured it out by now. Still, by the looks of it, IPB seems bit more pro. How about 3rd party extensions for these two platforms? Which platform has bigger community pools? Thanks
3rd party dev community is far stronger at Xenforo. Go hang out in the support forums at both IPB and XF for a bit, see which one feels better to you. Try out the demo for each too.
Read this posted by Paul.M on TAZ yesterday. They basically only have one full-time person working on vB5 now, others might jump on it when they can. He admits vB3 and vB4, Internet Brands have no interest in either anymore and there's nobody anyway to work on it bar himself (in his own free time). But I was more surprised to read how small the development team has shrunk too, one full-time person working on vB5?
I see people have mentioned XF and IPB, but you should also look into Burning Board. Make a list of which features you have on your forum now, and check which software can match it with default features and addons. Also look at the depth of the developer communities.
