Virtual Pet List is the best community for pet sites. It's been #1 for a very long time, and has been bringing life back into the virtual pet industry. I think VPL is a big reason why we see new virtual pet sites being developed.
Agreed.
It has brought back fond memories of my "pet" site and I have a collection of ideas off in a side-project folder to possibly work on one in my free time.
I was looking for the best template system to run as a base so I don't need to manage a ton of code, and had it down to two.
That said, I've been developing for XenForo for a couple of weeks now (longer if you include standalone "add ons" that don't interact with XenForo directly, but when you go to the /script.php, it'll run the XF code to do things). I've made 2 add ons that help my forum; one add on extends another add on as I didn't like how it functioned, so rewrote that section of the add on in my own add on (sounds weird to extend an add on, but it can be done) and another add on was just completed to automate replies on a cron job, which I'll tweak a bit and implement across all forums.
I've learned how functional XenForo is in its simplest form to extend to do just about everything. It already manages sign ups, mail, users, has user groups to execute different tasks, etc.
Suffice it to say, it's now on my shortlist to develop my pet site on.
Easy to modify a profile to show strength, endurance, etc., and disable the forum if I don't want a forum, or create a simple blog to post game updates to.
Compare that to a template system, you'd have to build up a bit more to get to where XenForo is.
/end rant