The developers of xenforo were previous vB developers who I think were fired due to the change of ownership from Jelsoft to Internet Brands. Thus the software is out to get vB.
public record doesn't show them being fired but XF is made by the former devs of vBulletin it's nice, but has a long ways to go still for production
XenForo will be sold under a commercial license, So much for a vbulletin killer..if it was open source maybe it would have killed vb
My view is that this looks pretty nice and allows the developer to start fresh with some fresh ideas instead of bending the code of vbulletin to his will. This is the sort of software forums needed 2 years ago that is more of a social networking thing and leaning more towards profile driven sites. I like the look of it, though am somewhat reserved about the idea of having to pay out of the box for something so new. I would like to see a bargain basement version or free version to start with, though I am keeping a firm eye on this. Whether I ever decide to ditch the Joomla side of my site or not and focus on the forums is another question, but this looks like it may get me to that point
It did a nice dent, but it wasn't enough. They needed something by Kier Darby to kill vBulletin. Don't get me wrong, I love IPB.
xenforo has a long, long way to go before its going to dent vbulletin. The amount of modifications for vb alone make it worth staying with - at least for a little while. This is the way I see it - I do not know why the vbulletin was held back, or why the developers did not listen to the customers. After all, the content management system should have been released years ago, and not in december 2009. Are the developers currently working on xenforo part of the vbulltin falling behind problem? Were they part of the team that rejected new ideas and request for new features? In the end, will xenforo turn out to be another stalled forum project like vbulletin used to be? Or will the offer a piece of software that changes with the times and adapts to the needs of the customer? I have a vbulletin project that I want to put together, but its going to be piece meal - something from here, something from there, buy this software, buy that software,,,, and hope everything works. It would be nice to see someone offer a complete solution.
I know it's still being written and has a long way to go but I don't like it at all. I'm not changing from vb but if I were, at this point I would more likely go to MyBB than XenForo.
Although xenforo looks decent, it's not a vbulletin killer. Vbulletin still has the largest modifications developers community of any forum software. It would take years or even decades to catch up to the sheer number of mods that Vbulletin owns. I always tell people that it's not about the brand of the software, it's what you want to do with it. Vbulletin is still certainly the best forum software because it feeds any community needs and wants. Not to mention Vbulletin 5 has been mentioned by one of the developers. http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?p=2084852#post2084852
As someone else mentioned. Customers asked for a CMS years ago and the developers didn't listen. Now there's no way to know for sure but Kier was the lead developer at the time so it's fairly safe to assume that he is the developer or one of the developers that didn't listen. There's two possible outcomes of that, first is that Kier was wanting a blow to vBulletin so that's why he didn't listen or he isn't too worried about customers opinions and therefore there's a strong chance that he's not going to listen to customers of XenForo when it's available. I really don't think that any forum software will kill vBulletin, not for a very long time anyway, and even if it did, it would more likely be IPB or MyBB and not XenForo. Of course Internet Brands themselves will most likely be the killer of vBulletin, especially if they pull another stunt with version 5 like the one we had with version 4.