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| Last Version | 1.0.4 (July 12th, 2011). | Released under | Proprietary License. |
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| Resources |  XenForo Website |
 Download… |
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| Company | XenForo Ltd. | ||
| Price | $140 for a Standard License, $250 for Brand Removal. | ||
XenForo progression began last year, commencing with two former and skilled designers of vBulletin: Kier Darby and Robert Sullivan. XenForo is centered really contemporary paradigms of overall performance, ergonomy and simpleness. Using the established PHP/MySQL pair, prolonged with the Zend Structure, the purpose of XenForo when the venture began was to make a message board app as it should be with these days constraints: extremely attached to web sites, depending on contemporary technological innovation, but maintaining it expert and simple.
You will indeed find out that XenForo is doing a really good using AJAX, because it only uses it to strengthen buyer, while others sometimes provide you with the sensation they want to change jQuery results records. It of course uses resources and solutions that are clearly essential if you want to have a contemporary and safe app ; to not cost them all: The search engines Statistics, Gravatar, Facebook or myspace, Tweets, ReCAPTCHA,…
How to Install XenForo
XenForo Pricing
XenForo License: $140. It features 12 several weeks of solution assistance and upgrades
Extension of assistance and upgrade: $40. Legitimate for 12 added several weeks.
Branding Removal: $250. Even if it’s really simple to think the message board app behind a web page, you can conceal XenForo trademark for this cost.
Installation by XenForo Services: $50. No practical knowledge of Web server? That’s for you.
Review Updates:
April 6th, 2011: Bring up to date Evaluation with XenForo 1.0.1.
March Sixteenth, 2011: First Evaluation.
Server & Client Requirements
| SERVER REQUIREMENTS | ||
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| Programming Language
Required Architecture and Versions.
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| Web Servers
How the forum is delivered to users.
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| Databases
How Forum Data are Stored.
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| Operating Systems
Systems Supporting this Software.
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GNU/Linux
BSD Unix
Microsoft Windows
Apple Mac OS| BROWSER & CLIENT REQUIREMENTS | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Compatible Browsers
List of Compatible Browsers.
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| Required Plugins/Technologies
Additional or Basic Requirements from Client Side.
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HTML, Javascript, AJAX, CSS. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Localization
Languages supported by XenForo.
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Yes.
Supported Languages:
The Official Language Forum of XenForo will provide you a good way to get updated and new translations in your language. |
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Mozilla Firefox
Internet Explorer
Google Chrome
Opera
Apple Safari
Konqueror
Mozilla SeaMonkey| COMPATIBILITY WITH SMARTPHONES | |
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| Compatible SmartPhones
Compatible Cellphone Brands and Manufacturers.
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| Application Distribution / Type
How it is distributed / App Store Availability
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Android
iPhone
BlackBerry
Windows Phone 7
Symbian Phones (Nokia)Forum Threads & Posts
| FORUM THREADS / TOPICS | |||
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| Forum Style | Flat | Forum Organization |
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| Thread Icons | Plugin | Topic Tags | No |
| Hot Topics | Yes | Unread Topics | Yes |
| Hidden Topics | Yes | Sticky Threads | Yes |
| Related Threads | No | Detect Duplicate Threads | No |
| Announcements | Yes | ||
| POSTING MESSAGES / ANSWERS | |||
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| Message Editing Form
How to Post Messages.
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| Post Editing Format
Supported Markup Language (HTML, Wiki,BBCode,…).
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| Spell Checker
Checks typos on posts and topics.
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No | ||
| Image Attachment
How Images can be Attached and Displayed in Message Posts.
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Additional & Technical Features
| ADDITIONAL FORUM FEATURES | |
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| Poll Creation | Yes |
| Private Messages
Users Can Communicate using an Internal Messaging System.
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Yes |
| Instant Messaging
Discuss with Visitors and Members in a Chat Window.
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Plugin |
| Calendar
Topic, Member Birthdays, Events are available from the perspective of a calendar.
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Plugin |
| Online Users List
Connected User List (Often Found in the Forum Footer).
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Yes |
| Members List
Search and Consult the List of Members.
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Yes |
MODERATION & THREADS MANAGEMENT
| MODERATION & THREADS MANAGEMENT | ||
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| Moderation |
Post-Moderation The moderation is done afterwards, if an administrator notices a problem or if a member reports something wrong. Each message is therefore directly published.
Reactive Moderation By reporting any problems, members are reactive against moderation problems. Moderators’ main objective is to regularly check user reports, without having to follow each threads.
Distributed Moderation By organizing the forum around moderators, who are usually power and experienced users, moderation is self-powered and only depends on the community.
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| Moderator per section | Yes | |
| Global Moderator | Yes | |
| Move Threads
Move Threads from Topics
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Yes | |
| Shadow Topics
When a thread is moved, the previous position is kept in order to inform users of this modification.
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Yes | |
| Close/Lock Threads
Close/Lock Problematic Threads
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Yes | |
| USERS MANAGEMENT | |
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| User Groups
Organize and define groups of users, and apply different actions and settings on them.
Common Groups: Guests, Members, Moderators, Administrators,… |
Yes |
| User Registration |
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| Limit Features For New Users
Features are limited if a user has created a small number of posts.
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| Guest Posting | Yes |
| Multiple Administrators | Yes |
| Send Warnings to Users
Inform users by email or PM that they infringe the board rules, and could be excluded for such behavior.
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Yes |
| Forum/Section Restricted Access
ACL could be use to determine if a user or a group of users can access (in read only, post message) to some sections and topics.
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Yes |
| User Banishment | |
Security & Spam Protection
| SECURITY & SPAM PROTECTION | ||
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| CAPTCHA
Captcha protects your forum against spam bots. e.g.,
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Yes
Complexity: Normal
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| Abnormal Behavior Detection
Detect users or request strange behaviors, and try to process proactive actions.
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No | |
| Words Filtering
Offensing Words are automatically replaced.
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Yes | |
| User Blacklist
Prevent specific user accounts to register (based on email address, name,…) and disable potentially harmful members.
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Yes | |
| IP Blocking
Prevent access to spam robots and other scripts that could attempt DDOS or Brute Force attacks on your forum.
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Yes | |
Customization & Social Networks
| CUSTOMIZATION | |||
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| Plugins
Add new features to your forum installation.
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Yes.
~175 Available Plugins.
Installation:Very Easy
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| Themes
Modify the style of your forum easily.
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Yes.
~80 Available Themes.
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| Custom BBCodes | Yes | Smiley Packs | Yes |
| Custom Thread Icons |
Plugin | Additional User Profile Fields
Ask more about your members with custom fields.
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Yes |
| INTEGRATION WITH APPLICATIONS, SOCIAL NETWORKS, INTRANET… | |
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| Social Networks
Users can share information from their social network account…
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| CMS / Blog Bridges
Integration with existing Web publishing tools.
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| User Accounts Integration
Do users be able to log in with their corporate, Google, Facebook,… accounts?
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| Content Aggregation
Forum allows to integrate news and content from other website, using an aggregation protocol (RSS, RDF, Atom,…).
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No. |
Facebook Connect1
Customizing BBCodes and Smileys is really easy, and XenForo supports natively Youtube, Facebook and Vimeo through the BBCode Media Site interface.
Styling and customizing the look of your forum is really easy, and XenForo provides several way to do it:
- Style: Import and modify a complete style.
- Color Palette: Customize default colors of your forum.
- Style Properties: Edit a group of properties, applied to a certain portion of your forum.
- Template Editor: Edit templates of your forum, to add new content if required.
About templates, note that the template engine is really well thought, and that the language is really simple to learn. Here is a small snippet of what you can do:
W3C Norms & Accessibility
| NORMS & ACCESSIBILITY | |
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| HTML / XHTML Markup
See W3C HTML Definition.
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HTML 5.
HTML 5 Click to see if it respects HTML norms.
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| CSS Stylesheets
See W3C CSS Definition.
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CSS 2.
Click to see if it respects CSS norms.
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| Accessibility (WAI)
Web Accessibility ensures that the forum is usable by people of all abilities and disabilities.
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Conformance to AA level.
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| UTF-8 Support
Default encoding used to support all locales and countries.
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Yes |
| Conformance to W3C Norms
Does XenForo correctly follow (X)HTML and CSS norms?
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Yes. |
Using an HTML 5 Doctype, you do know that XenForo is the first forum software entering to the new generation of the Web.
Final Words
If four words could sum up the feeling we have using XenForo, they would probably be: “XenForo is absolutely outstanding!”. I were positively surprised by all the small things making the user experience fun and efficient, while being able to mask the complexity by using new web standards and a very nice ergonomy.
XenForo is indeed the first forum fully compliant with HTML 5, providing for its first major release almost all must-have features that other forum software developed in, sometimes, 10 years. Of course, as a company, XenForo Ltd has to make money and had to provide the best forum software ever if they want to get a place on the extremely competing sector of forums and social networking, and this is clearly what they did. As former vBulletin employees, we clearly see that developers who work on XenForo have a strong background and have tons of ideas they were not able to apply on their previous job, probably because of the old-fashioned style vBulletin monolithic-code has.
Anyway, I would highly suggest you to have a look to XenForo demonstration, because it is really hard to describe here all the eye-candy and sugar features that are put in place into XenForo: your own experience will convince you more than this review.