Today, we have a video showing upcoming improvements to the XenForo help system, and a new way to surface profile posts.
View on Vimeo
My apologies for the sound quality, I'm hoping that some new audio gear will be arriving before I record the next one of these.
Just a reminder: Please do not post suggestions in this thread (even if you feel they are related). Use the dedicated suggestion forum so they can be tracked; suggestions made in this thread are unlikely to be implemented.
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
Some of you may have spotted this in a previous Have You Seen, but today we're going to look at XenForo 1.3's custom BB code support in detail.
At a high level, custom BB codes let you define BB codes to fit your site's needs. This allows you to give your users more options for mark up, without opening up arbitrary HTML and the various issues (security and otherwise) that come with that. A BB code may take an "option" parameter if needed, such as in ....
Basic Options
Let's look at the main BB code creation form. It's a biggie:
This is just the "basic" fields. We'll get into the advanced stuff in a bit.
Many of these fields should be self explanatory. The title/description mostly relate to the help page, as well the example...
In an attempt to decrease the number of HTTP requests made (and thereby speed up pages), virtually all of XenForo 1.1's UI icon graphics come from just two sprites.
xenforo-ui-sprite.png
node-sprite.png
Attached below are the 24 bit versions of the same sprites, for those of you who wish to edit them but don't have a graphic program which supports the 8 bit versions.
By exposing code events and allowing listeners to attach to them, XenForo makes it easy to alter its default functionality with simple callback classes.
The API for doing this is well-defined and documented, so modifications made in this way stand a very good chance of remaining backward compatible through future version updates.
This video shows me creating a simple add-on that allows us to see how an existing thread would look with over a thousand pages.
As usual, it's a large, HD video, so I suggest you view it at its original size by clicking the full-screen gadget in the bottom-right corner of the video.
Edit: If for whatever reason you can't view the video here, view it directly on Vimeo (but please leave comments here, not...
While the conversation concept in XenForo works well, there have been some challenges managing your conversations, particularly if you have a lot. XenForo 1.2 makes some changes to improve this.
Most of the changes can be seen in this one screen shot:
So the first thing to note is that conversations now have their own tab, which allows us to give a few additional navigation links to specific lists.
From there, you'll note that conversations can be starred. You can see the conversation listed there is starred. Starring works like you're probably used to in emails; it's mostly to allow filtering.
You can also bulk manage your conversations (over multiple pages) using the inline moderation-style check box. You can star/unstar...
Ahh, it seems like only yesterday (as I write this, it was!) we were talking about the fifth in our HYS series for XF 2.1, and already we're onto the sixth, so welcome! In case you've not yet seen the previous entries, (why not?!) you can check them out here.
As ever, to ensure you're kept up to date, we strongly recommend giving that "Watch forum" link a tickle and make sure you enable email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂
The proliferation of human-backed CAPTCHA breakers and all manner of other means to break through anti-robot protection on forums means that spam prevention systems must now be joined with spam clean-up utilities.
With this in mind, XenForo introduces the Spam Cleaner - a one-stop shop for quickly and easily dealing with spam that has made it onto your forum.
I suggest you view this video at full-size by clicking the full-screen gadget in the bottom-right of the video.
Following on from the bulk user management feature we showed earlier, XenForo 1.2 will also allow you to do bulk thread management from the control panel. You will be able to search for any thread with this set of criteria:
Note that this finds threads and not posts within them.
And then you can take the following actions on matching threads:
I don't believe we showed this with bulk user management, but the same option applies there. If you're unsure if the matches are correct or if you want to manually filter them down, you can click the "view or filter matches" link. For bulk thread management, you'll get results like this:
You can use the check boxes on the left to manually filter which of the matched threads will be...
Over the next few weeks, we'll be adding to the Building with XenForo 2 video series, starting today with a look at how to make your custom add-on content taggable!
Part 15 - Implementing tagging
Part 16 - Busting out of the PAGE_CONTAINER
Part 17 - Building a filterable admin control panel list
In today's 'Have you seen...?' entry for XenForo 2.3 we're going to look at how we've zeroed in on enhancing performance, ensuring your community has a swift and seamless experience. We're going to take a deep dive into the advancements we've made and how they stack up against various performance metrics.
But, before we get into the individual changes, let's take a quick look at the baseline - this is our current Performance score as calculated by Lighthouse for the XenForo Community forum list:
Here's the performance scores for some other forum software:
It's crucial to note that while this score provides a performance benchmark, it isn't the only indicator of success. Indeed, results can fluctuate slightly with multiple test...
This video looks at some of the improvements we have made to the BB code media system in XenForo 1.1, allowing you to embed media from a far wider variety of sources.
Update:
Let's call this rapid feedback reaction or something buzz-wordy like that. Anyway, just a few hours after posting the last video, I have a little update for you :)
Most forums need to deal with members whose email address becomes invalid. Sometimes the user will go ahead and change it, but other times your forum will fire off emails to this now invalid address. When this happens, if you have a bounce email address setup in XenForo (and possibly with the -f option enabled in the mail configuration), you will receive an email telling you about the failure.
Email delivery failures can happen for a wide variety of reasons. If you continually send to an address that has been disabled, for example, this can count against your domain/IP's email reputation. A lower email reputation can lead to reduced email deliverability as your domain may appear to be a spammer.
Therefore, when you are notified that...
In what is probably one of the worst kept secrets in XenForo 'Have you seen...?' history, the eagle eyed amongst you may have picked up on one or two... or three... clues that we may be talking about this soon, and the day has finally arrived! Today we're excited to show you our take on the highly requested webhook implementation in XenForo.
For those of you who haven't heard of webhooks before, they are a powerful utility that allow one application or service to send information to another when certain events occur. These can be everyday actions such as when making a payment for access to a product or service, or more specific implementations such as having a new Thread from your forum posted to Discord automatically.
It is likely...
