How will VW4 for XF handle missing XF functionality? (tags, bbcode, etc)

**Alfa1** · June 15, 2013

Its clear that more than a few websites will be migrating from vb to xf.
XF currently lacks some functions that vb has. This can pose a challenge to VW development and to migration.
For example thread tags: I really do not want to loose a mass of thread tags attached to my wikis. The solution could be to use the immensely popular XenTag.

Another issue is custom bbcodes. Many of my wikis have custom bbcodes to textwrap images, tables, show google maps, google insights, LaTex symbols, superscript, etc. XF does not support custom bb codes. But without it hundreds of wiki articles would be destroyed. For custom bb codes there also is a very popular addon: Custom BB Code Manager.

How do you want to approach problems like this?

**pegasus** · June 15, 2013

Since you mention it, thread tags are already lost when upgrading from VaultWiki 3 to VaultWiki 4. Ideally thread tags should be converted to wiki categories.

As for social group wikis, currently they are simply imported as regular wiki pages.

As for custom BB-Codes, VaultWiki doesn't do anything special with non-wiki BB-Codes. It handles the parsing and conversion of its own tags during imports, as well as other platform dependent tags (vBulletin's NOPARSE to XenForo's PLAIN). If you have custom BB-Codes, and there is a solution to also have custom BB-Codes in XenForo (whether Custom BB-Code Manager, or by creating your own handlers), then VaultWiki doesn't need to do anything special itself.

**Alfa1** · June 15, 2013

Originally Posted by pegasus

Since you mention it, thread tags are already lost when upgrading from VaultWiki 3 to VaultWiki 4. Ideally thread tags should be converted to wiki categories.

vb thread tags are vital to my SE traffic and SEO. It would really hurt my sites to have the tags converted to categories. I concur that categories are almost the same as tags, but the main difference is that vb thread tags combine content from various content types. Another difference is that while a category is essentially a tag, a tag is not a category. Many tags are simple singular narrow concepts. Categories are containers of concepts.

In XenForo's XenTag it combines content from all content types. This approach is optimal and is as it should have been in vbulletin.
I would be very amazed if XF does not add tags in one of the upcoming releases. Its the 4th popular suggestion and they are implementing pretty much every popular suggestion. I think this is something to consider.