Wordpress... or not?

[Tom Dunn]

I was referred to you (LPH) by Bob, the developer of the Showcase addon. He said you may be the best person to answer this question.

I've been using Wordpress for years, on many client sites, as well as sites of my own. Now, i am creating a new review site which allows my visitors to review a certain type of product, around which the entire site will be based, similar to this site >>> http://www.tractorbynet.com/guide/

There will also be a forum, as well as articles/news type content produced by me. My plan was to use Wordpress as I've always done, but after wasting several moths and a good amount of money trying to get the reviews component created, I discovered XenForo.

After creating the forum, I began to discover the flexibility of XenForo and determined that it could also be used for the Reviews part of the site, not just the forum. My question now is, could/should I use Xenforo for the whole site, including the article/news type content? Should I just scrap Wordpress for this site?

Or, should I keep Wordpress, and use your XenWord addon to merge the two? I'm a little confused here trying to figure the best way forward, and trying to avoid as many mistakes as I can. Thank you in advance for any advice you can offer.

 

[Gracie]

We have decades of articles from 1996 forward which we are trying to preserve. We chose WordPress years ago. We also merged old vBulletin posts over to XenForo. @LPH created XenWord to bridge the two different types of sites. Later we added Bob's Showcase and finally his blogging addon (the Dev Logs). We use WordPress categories to separate all of the older sites which were merged into this one.

If you are starting from the ground up then I'd consider one platform -- XenForo. I have nothing against using WordPress or even combining them. It's a matter of easier maintenance.

Having written that -- XenForo 2 addons will take a long time to catch up. If someone wants the latest and greatest then plan XenForo and plan XenForo 2 for 2018 at the earliest.

@LPH might disagree. He's carried on lately about the need to write blog entires from his iPad Pro. You'll see on this site that he uses the blogging addon for Dev Logs -- and he wrote a WordPress plugin so that the latest shows in WordPress. However, he purchased Ulysses to create entries for WordPress, and published as Drafts to WordPress.

When should both WordPress and XenForo be used? Established sites archiving both articles and posts. If there is a need for a plugin in WordPress, not available. The need to write long entries offline.