Jason Axelrod

The original version of XenPorta 1.0 was released a short four days after the open beta of the XenForo platform. It was created in order to fill the needs that people had with the platform and the lack of a front-page for their forums. XenPorta was released for free, because I was new to the platform and didn't feel comfortable charging for an under-produced and impossible to support piece of software. Some time later, I released XenPorta 1.5, which tacked a rudimentary widget framework onto the existing XenPorta 1.0 software.

XenPorta as it stands now is the most popular XenForo addon ever released. If you include the two years it was out before the implementation of the XenForo Resource Manager, it has been downloaded more times and has more response posts than any other addon. As such, I have in the past been unable to support XenPorta; especially since it was free.

It is now over 3 years later and I have learned so much about XenForo and the Zend platform... to the point that I have begun releasing premium, and fully supported versions of my software. However, since XenPorta is my oldest, and most popular software released yet, it requires the most amount of work to rewrite. Unfortunately, with the amount of work that is going to be required to rewrite XenPorta, development can not continue without proper funding.

My plans for XenPorta 2.0 is actually to completely make a new piece of software more similar to a content management system. Since most of the features in 1.5 were simply tacked on, they don't run as efficiently as I would have liked. As well, though it wont be a full CMS, it will have many CMS-like features.

Features:
- More customization options for news promotions.
- Modular block replication with individual settings.
- Easier block creation system for non-developers.
- Streamlined methods for creating widget layouts.
- Custom content (secondary) article pages.
- A small stock of built in widgets.
- Its supported!

Attempts:
I have not looked into xfrock's widget framework software at all... However, if possible, I would like to make the software compatible with blocks made for his framework as well. But I can't guarantee this.

Software such as this takes time. As such, I can not give an exact date of public release. I have listed it as December 2014 as a safety measure, but I assume it will be ready for public release sometime before that. As well, I have not yet decided on the final pricing structure of this software; but with crowd-funding, you can guarantee your price.

People ask me, "why?". Why is this a crowd-fund? Why couldn't I just work on XenPorta without the crowd-fund, work on the rewrite and charge full price when its released? Well I think rainmotorsports on the xenforo.com forums said it best, "The problem is without the income there is no time. Money is right now and when you need to pay the bills things that are not paying out have to be put aside. A paid add on eventually pays out but when you can not commit the time due to having to do other work its not going to happen.".