Anyone who has developed add-ons for XenForo 1.1 knows that template hooks are a pain. They're a pain for us too, to say the least. Plenty of people have installed the Template Modification System add-on. We've been planning a TMS-like system for some time, before the XenForo add-on was ever actually released.
XenForo 1.2 will deprecate the template hook system and introduce it's own template modification system to make it easier for add-on developers to change templates. Note that I'm primarily focused on add-on developers here. It is possible to create your own custom template modifications if you're not an add-on developer, but unless you have multiple styles, I'd recommend just making the changes to the templates directly.
Let's...
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
Route Filters are a new system in XenForo 1.2 to allow you to change the standard URLs generated by XenForo, including any URLs generated by add-ons.
It's a fairly simple system to show, but it's very powerful with a little thought. Let's look at what you can set with it:
Other than a list of route filters, that's really it for the system. So how about a few examples...
Changing a route prefix
There's an add-on that does this right now, but we can do it simply from here. For example, if you want to change the resources URL to downloads, you'd just enter resources/ in the find box and downloads/ in the replace box.
Instantly, any links to http://xenforo.com/community/resources/ would become...
XenForo 1.2 now has a new collection of permissions to control what your users can put in their signatures.
For performance reasons, these restrictions are only checked when a user tries to change their signature. It will not invalidate existing signatures.
The easiest thing to do is to simply show the permissions that can be set:
For user friendliness, if a user tries to use a BB code tag that they don't have permission to use, it will simply be stripped out. For other errors (too many images, too long, etc), the user will receive an error.
Post edit history and logging has been one of the most requested features and it will be a core feature in XenForo 1.2.
Post Edit Logging
Post edit logging is the simpler of the two features. It adds an indication to the post when it has been edited. We have intentionally kept this feature simple for the average user. They have no reason that they have to enter; if they're inclined, they can always include the reason in the message.
We do track the last person to edit the message, but this is not displayed. It could be easily added with an add-on. In most cases, the last edit will be by the owner and the average user likely doesn't care about who edited it. If a moderator needs to know, the history gives much more detailed...
In the first of our spotlights on new features in 1.2, we're going to be looking at 2 user management improvements in particular. Keep an eye on this forum to see when we post more teasers. :)
Note that any features we demonstrate here are still in development, so things about them may change before they're released in a 1.2 beta.
User Merging
The first feature is rather important, though fairly simple to explain. In 1.2, you can now merge 2 users. The "source" user will have all of their content assigned to the "target" user and then the "source" user will be deleted.
It's very easy to use. From the user edit page in the admin CP, you can choose to merge:
Then it's just a matter of choosing who you want to merge into...
