The First XenForo Interview

[Floris]

We’ve had the opportunity to interview Mike Sullivan and Kier Darby from XenForo Limited, and ask them a few questions about their new company and upcoming forum product.

Hello Mike and Kier. Well thank-you for taking some time out of your busy day to answer a couple of questions so we can gain some insight into XenForo. We promise that we don’t want any big stories or intricacy, just a little sneak peak behind the curtain so to speak.

• What inspired you to create a completely new forum product and get back into the forum software market, rather than jump onboard one of the numerous other products out there?
  We felt that there was a place to step back and re-evaluate how forum software works. Obviously, there are things that fundamentally have to stay the same, but we’ve tried to challenge some of the standard ideas. Not all of these have worked, but a number have. We want to move fast, and the only way to do that was to have a modern, flexible core that could stand up to our lofty ideas.

• What was your favorite part of the product to code?
  We each have different areas of expertise and there’s a lot of code, so it’s hard to pick favorites. Seeing the framework–both the PHP and the JavaScript–come together and support the features is very uplifting. It’s a really nice boost to see a very helpful feature be taken from start to finish in an hour. (That particular example just happened the other night!)

• How does XenForo distinguish itself from the other forum softwares already in existence? Why should developers choose the XenForo platform? Why should a hobbyist choose the XenForo platform?
  From a user standpoint, we’ve put quite a bit of focus into the interface. We’ve tried to make things as intuitive and easy to use as possible. It’s important to have an application that people find fun to use. For example, if your users keep coming back to see if people have liked their messages, then that’s going to help grow your forum. Getting (and keeping!) traffic on your forum is the most important thing when creating a community.
  From a developer standpoint, the framework that helps us develop quickly will help you. There’s a very flexible set of events/hooks in the code that will allow you to extend the code in ways we can’t imagine. You can attach to one event and literally change hundreds of behaviors. We also have a very rich template syntax that makes formatting the output simple.

• There has already been talk about a XenForo modification/application community. What kinds of things will you do differently from say vBulletin.org? Do you plan on offering tools to help promote professional developers sell their services (perhaps a certified directory of sorts)?
  We’re very aware that third-party developers will be an important part of the ecosystem. We currently intend to keep the modification community together with the official community on XenForo.com. We (as developers) plan to provide documentation and tutorials to other developers to help them make the changes they need. There will definitely be a learning curve to developing for XenForo; it’s a big system and it approaches things differently from what people might be used to. We want to flatten that curve as much as possible.
  As for paid services, we are still evaluating the best course of action for this.

• What is the one question you thought people would ask on the XenForo community, but haven’t yet (and what’s the answer)?
  Honestly, the few questions we could think of have been far exceeded by the questions that would’ve never crossed our minds. It’s been great to get as much feedback as we have. It will clearly make for a better product in the end.

We will let you guys go back to fixing bugs and processing user feedback, and we’ll go back to bug hunting. We know you’re busy, so thank-you again for giving us some of your time. See you later on http://xenforo.com.

Mike Sullivan
XenForo Developer
Male, 26, from Glasgow, UK
Homepage: http://xenforo.com
Full Profile / @mike_sul

Kier Darby
XenForo Developer
Male, from Reading, UK
Homepage: http://kierdarby.com
Full Profile / @kierdarby


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[Floris]

The above post was originally posted on our blog, and received the following comments:

new2boards says:
Hi, I am new to forums, and after reading what's going on with the top 3 boards, this seems to be getting the most thumbs up. Reading more about the guys that wrote it was enough for me to hold and wait for their purchase page to show up.

John says:
Wow, great interview Thank you for posting.

Kim says:
Great to read how the development process and design philosophies are occurring behind the scenes! Keep up the excellent work guys

Christian says:
thanks for sharing Floris!

Mikey says:
Awesome answers, good interview

Brian says:
Keep an eye on xenfans.com. Who knows? We might even have more interesting articles to come.

Peggy says:
Excellent interview. Good job guys.

nursing schools says:
nice post. thanks.

Gravity says:
Thanks Floris.

Steve M says:
Great interview, questions I never thought of were answered. Thanks Floris

Hyer says:
Pretty good post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your blog posts.

weiyanwo says:
Although my target users are Chines, the English interface is not a problem since its very intuitive. This interface encourage imagination and creativity of users.

Tommy says:
Thank god, i found this article. I thought the old VB developers dissapeared, and they are back with a great new forum.
I hope I’ll be able to convert my VB to the new XenForo

KJBweb says:
Lets hope the recent lawsuit from Internet Brands doesnt hold up this fantastic project.
Its clear that from this lawsuit, Internet Brands are well aware the product they mindlessly micro-managed down to the last bean/deadline had user/administrator experience way down on the priority list; thus ultimately producing a lemon, adopted purely because of its predecessors.

 

[MrJohn]

Wow what a great interview. Thanks for the good read. After seeing this I am a bit happier about making my choice to switch forum softwares. Hopefully the lawsuit doesn't affect anything with Xenforo.