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We are considering changing the site software from vBulletin 4 to xenForo 1.4.
We've long been wanting to do a major site upgrade so we would be using more modern technology than the vB4 we've been using for the past several years.
I can list a whole lot of reasons why we want to switch, but it would take a lot of space to list them all here. But I can give you a handful of good reasons:
1. The xenforo editor is actually WYSIWYG. For me, I see the BBCode tags in the vB4 editor and it's not WYSIWYG at all. I have to click "preview post" button to see what the post will actually look like.
2. xenforo allows people to sign up using Facebook, twitter, and google credentials. The last straw for vB4 (for me) was trying to turn on Facebook login capability and finding out that vBulletin company knows it doesn't work and there's no fix in sight for it that I could find.
3. The xenforo skins are "responsive." This is a technical term that means that the forum resizes super nicely depending on the size of the browser window. Specifically, for phone and tablet screens. Instead of seeing the full page with tiny everything, the page is laid out in the correct size to fit the screen:
4. The xenforo code is super clean and easy for me to work with. vBulletin is well known, but I found it to have a much larger learning curve to do anything with it at the code level.
The downsides are:
1. I have to redo the skins on the entire site. That was a several day project for vB4. I will do the generic S2 then Blazers forum skins first, then take my time doing all the rest.
2. The site will have to go off the air for as much as 24 hours. The database has to be migrated from the vB4 table scheme to the xenforo one. The process of doing the ~4M database queries (we have 3.5M+ posts alone, each a query) takes time. If I leave the old site up, any posting done after taking a snapshot of the database will be lost when we flip the switch (switch over).
3. Some features are missing, some things don't work the same.
For example, the "members viewing forum" stats is not available out of the box with xenforo. I will be able to make that work, and I think it would be really slick when I do it. But you'll have to bear with us while I get around to doing it.
Another example is reputation. The new forum software has a concept of "likes" instead. People "like" threads/posts and it shows up like rep. You can see all your likes going back to the beginning with the new software. The likes show up in the thread view, too.
4. It took a lot of little tweaks to vB4 to get it the way it is now. It's going to take a lot of little tweaks to make xenforo the way we ultimately want it.
5. It's new. People generally don't like "new."
I have set up a xenforo version of SportsTwo on a public server that is password protected. if you want to have a look and try it out, send me a PM and I'll give you the details. I don't want it made public for security reasons.
If you have anything to say about whether we should or shouldn't do the upgrade, please reply in this thread. It's not a done deal, but I do think it's a good idea. If the idea is hugely unpopular, I could be convinced not to.
We've long been wanting to do a major site upgrade so we would be using more modern technology than the vB4 we've been using for the past several years.
I can list a whole lot of reasons why we want to switch, but it would take a lot of space to list them all here. But I can give you a handful of good reasons:
1. The xenforo editor is actually WYSIWYG. For me, I see the BBCode tags in the vB4 editor and it's not WYSIWYG at all. I have to click "preview post" button to see what the post will actually look like.
2. xenforo allows people to sign up using Facebook, twitter, and google credentials. The last straw for vB4 (for me) was trying to turn on Facebook login capability and finding out that vBulletin company knows it doesn't work and there's no fix in sight for it that I could find.
3. The xenforo skins are "responsive." This is a technical term that means that the forum resizes super nicely depending on the size of the browser window. Specifically, for phone and tablet screens. Instead of seeing the full page with tiny everything, the page is laid out in the correct size to fit the screen:
4. The xenforo code is super clean and easy for me to work with. vBulletin is well known, but I found it to have a much larger learning curve to do anything with it at the code level.
The downsides are:
1. I have to redo the skins on the entire site. That was a several day project for vB4. I will do the generic S2 then Blazers forum skins first, then take my time doing all the rest.
2. The site will have to go off the air for as much as 24 hours. The database has to be migrated from the vB4 table scheme to the xenforo one. The process of doing the ~4M database queries (we have 3.5M+ posts alone, each a query) takes time. If I leave the old site up, any posting done after taking a snapshot of the database will be lost when we flip the switch (switch over).
3. Some features are missing, some things don't work the same.
For example, the "members viewing forum" stats is not available out of the box with xenforo. I will be able to make that work, and I think it would be really slick when I do it. But you'll have to bear with us while I get around to doing it.
Another example is reputation. The new forum software has a concept of "likes" instead. People "like" threads/posts and it shows up like rep. You can see all your likes going back to the beginning with the new software. The likes show up in the thread view, too.
4. It took a lot of little tweaks to vB4 to get it the way it is now. It's going to take a lot of little tweaks to make xenforo the way we ultimately want it.
5. It's new. People generally don't like "new."
I have set up a xenforo version of SportsTwo on a public server that is password protected. if you want to have a look and try it out, send me a PM and I'll give you the details. I don't want it made public for security reasons.
If you have anything to say about whether we should or shouldn't do the upgrade, please reply in this thread. It's not a done deal, but I do think it's a good idea. If the idea is hugely unpopular, I could be convinced not to.
