How will XenForo compare to other forum software, especially vB, in terms of:
- SEO
- Spam countermeasures
- Security
- Skinning/Styling
- Modifications
- Scalability
- Resource Utilization
SEO:
XenForo employs lightweight, semantic HTML 5 throughout and maintains a high signal to noise ratio with our markup. Embedded HTML 5 microdata is employed where appropriate to assist search engines in deciphering what they fetch. We send appropriate HTTP status codes for the content being displayed and make use of human-readable URLs as a fundamental building-block of our linking system, while avoiding situations where multiple different links point to the same content. All content elements have permalinks. Pages not intended to be indexed are marked-up as such to prevent spiders from caching them. This is just a summary of some of our SEO tools - which we don’t even refer to as SEO tools, as they are simply built into the system as a matter of course.
Spam Counter Measures:
ReCAPTCHA is implemented as a first line of defense against spam registrations, but should spammers get through, we have a Spam Cleaner tool that can deal with it all quickly and efficiently. Additional approaches are on the list for future XenForo versions.
Security:
There is a lot to talk about on this subject, so I will just give one example for now. Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a common problem for applications that manage user-generated content. One approach that XenForo takes to deal with this is to store all content in an unescaped form. When that data is displayed in a template, it is automatically HTML-escaped, unless it is specifically instructed to avoid the escaping. This makes it extremely difficult to accidentally introduce an XSS flaw into XenForo.
Skinning / Styling:
This is a subject we are still revealing piecemeal in our ‘Have You Seen..?’ forum. It’s something we have taken a lot of time to get right, so I won’t go into too much detail here, except to point you to a few examples of our style system at work.
Modifications:
XenForo was built from the ground-up with modifications and add-ons in mind. As a result, almost every system can be extended and or modified. The MVC architecture lends itself particularly well to this, as it is possible to have code operate on the application after the business logic but before the display code, for example.
Scalability/ Resource Usage:
A common theme in the comments we have received so far from people visiting XenForo.com has been the speed of the application. This is all the more impressive for the fact that we are running on a relatively modest server, which already hosts a five-million post vBulletin 3.8 installation. We are very light on our database usage, and we have barely started to play with additional caching with memcache and similar systems. Good things are to come.
Seriously, thanks.
