I have a DASP hosted ASP.NET web site and I'm currently using ASP.NET based forum software but am considering switching to XenForo. The XenForo requirements are: PHP: 5.2.11+ MySQL: 5.0+ PHP extensions: MySQLi, GD (with JPEG support), PCRE, SPL, SimpleXML, DOM, JSON, iconv, ctype PHP safe_mode off Are all these requirements supported by DASP? My background is ASP.NET and I have limited PHP experience, especially in a hosted environment. Will I have permission to add the required PHP extensions and switch off safe mode? My web site and the forum are deployed as separate ASP.NET applications with a link like http://www.mysite.com/forums. How would I link the ASP.NET and XenForo applications? Would XenForo have to be hosted in a subdomain eg forums.mysite.com? I realize that DASP use XenForo but is anyone else using XenForo hosted by DASP? Thanks.
Yes, you should be able to install XenForo on DiscountASP.NET. I have working installation on Everleap, so it should work here as well. As to your other question: Will I have permission to add the required PHP extensions and switch off safe mode? I have limited experience with XenForo so I'm not sure what you mean by "safe mode," but the extensions should already be enabled. Maybe MJP can chime in here. Regarding the linking, I'm not sure what you want to do. XenForo is pretty much a complete Forum Package Software. I would just keep it separate, and put some kind of HTML link on your main site that links to the forums. XenForo doesn't have to be in a sub-domain. You should be able to install it in a sub-directory.
Safe mode (http://php.net/manual/en/ini.sect.safe-mode.php) being off is a requirement of XenForo. However, it looks like this feature has been removed from later versions of PHP so that shouldn't be an issue. I really would like to hear from someone who has experience with hosting XenForo on DASP or at least someone from DASP who can say whether it's supported and, if so, what's required to get it working. Thanks.
We never tested XenForo on a Windows server here, honestly, so I can't give you any direct experience along those lines. We were going to run the Everleap forum on the Everleap platform (which we do for the blog), but in the end decided to host the forum on a linux server. That was more of an expedience of deployment decision, rather than a platform decision. We have talked about moving the Everleap XenForo installation to the Everleap servers, but I'm afraid I haven't had the opportunity to do any testing over there yet. You shouldn't run in to any php-specific problems (as you noted, safe_mode has been removed from php as of 5.4). I think if you were going to see any problems with XenForo they would be database resource-related, but that's something that would apply to any shared MySQL server, not just here. Whether that would be a potential issue really depends on how busy your forum is. I'm sure you've noticed that modern forums and CMS use a lot more resources than they did in the past. That causes problems with some of those applications on shared servers. That's one of the primary reasons we nudge people toward Everleap, because they are running into resource issues here (or at another shared host). Sorry I don't have any specific experience to pass along. But I know other people have asked about running XenForo, so I'm sure someone is doing it. Maybe they will see this and chime in.
