Features
XenForo offers a number of useful features.
Trophies
As mentioned above, XenForo’s major feature is its award system. The awards are called “trophies” and they can be customized through the software’s control panel. They can include getting a certain number of likes on a post or posting a certain number of messages.
Alerts
Users can receive alerts related to events like someone replying to their posts
Add-Ons
While XenForo is a proprietary program, there are lots of add-ons that customers can use to customize their installation.
Recent Activity Stream
XenForo has a recent activity stream for users. This shows things like new posts and replies. Users can customize their streams. Developers can also create their own add-ons.
Customization
Users can change the way XenForo looks with a color picker. This makes it easy for a business to have a forum that matches a company’s color scheme. It’s also possible to use HTML and CSS as well as a style property editor for more precise customization of a forum’s theme.
SEO
XenForo also has integrated SEO functionality. This might be useful for companies providing support through a forum. Customers can find official information by searching for a problem. They’ll find their problem as one of the top search results solved in a forum thread.
Licensing
A basic license includes one year of ticket support. The company has several upgrades available. These include removing the XenForo branding, installing it on a server, a media gallery application, a resource manager, and enhanced search.
Hosting XenForo
XenForo runs on servers that have PHP and MySQL installed. That is, the majority of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) servers. That gives it a potentially wide customer base. Installation consists of extracting the files to the right directory and navigating to the web-based configuration. All of the configuration for XenForo happens through the control panel.
What Is XenForo For?
With its awards feature, XenForo seems most appropriate for forum owners who want to really build a community. The trophies reward frequent and useful contributions. This makes the software useful for companies using their forum to provide support, augmenting their official customer service operations. It also might appeal to gaming forums, as users there tend to be as competitive on forums as they are in the games.
Downsides
The downside is XenForo’s proprietary nature. The company is competing with some very popular open source alternatives, like phpBB. XenForo is also implemented in PHP, itself a very popular open source language. More technically savvy forum operators might want to consider an open source forum engine first, as it’s possible to customize the behavior without having to pay for extra functionality. Administrators who are pressed for time, on the other hand, might appreciate that a proprietary solution can be easier to install and have better support options than an open source program. On the other hand, community support for open source programs, including forums, can be surprisingly good because the developers often participate.
Alternatives to XenForo
There are several alternatives to XenForo. As mentioned earlier, phpBB is a very popular open source forum engine, as well as MyBB. Another popular commercial option is vBulletin. If you’re comfortable with open source software and don’t need much in the way of support, you might consider one of the free options. These programs also have vast ecosystems of plug-ins to choose from, enabled by their open source code.
Bottom Line
XenForo is a solid option for forum administrators who need to get up and running quickly and want to build a great community. With its unique rewards feature, it will appeal to those wanting their forums to offer customer support as well as build camaraderie.
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