Although you will not have noticed it yet because of the permissions we have currently set here on XenForo.com, there has been work behind the scenes on the attachment system for 1.1...
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
Let's take a break from some of the bigger feature improvements coming in 1.2 and look at some of the smaller tweaks. This isn't necessarily an exhaustive list. I can't really remember everything. ;)
User thread title editing
A new permission has been added to control whether users can edit the titles of their own threads. This is automatically tied into the post editing length permission.
This also includes editing the prefix as well.
Style property cache size reduced
If you have a number of styles installed, you may have had to fight with MySQL max_allowed_packet due to the style property cache size. The cache will now only store changes from the default value, reducing the size of the cache per style.
Template compilation...
We're fast approaching the time where we're able to unleash XenForo 2.2 on this very forum but, before we do, we wanted to tell you about a few slightly more miscellaneous features that we've been keeping under our hat.
Advanced options switch
The eagle-eyed amongst you may have already spotted some hints about this in some of our earlier screenshots. 🤫
XenForo has an ever-increasing number of options and then by the time you put add-on options in the mix, the options pages may start to feel somewhat daunting and unwieldy at times, especially for new admins to the platform. After all, there are nearly 200 options in XenForo alone.
We (and add-on developers) are now able to mark options or entire option groups as "advanced".
What...
When we first announced support for article-type threads and forums, we noted that this was an initial foray and that revised styling was in the pipeline.
Today, we can show you some of those revisions and the options that come with them.
Revised article styling
Firstly, we have some updates for the main article thread page.
The author section at the bottom of the article has had some attention to visually separate it a little more from the article body, and in order to provide a bit more meat for search engines to bite into, the author's about text is rendered underneath their name too.
As articles can be very long, we also show the author's name in the attribution bar at the top of the article too, along with the number of comments...
Welcome to the fifth in our "Have you seen...?" series for XF 2.1. 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 tap and make sure you enable email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂
As with many of our previous releases, XenForo 1.4 is adding more options to help prevent spam from being posted on your forum. Our focus here is mostly directed towards preventing automated bot registrations.
Additional CAPTCHA Types
Out of the box, we now support a number of additional CAPTCHA providers:
Text CAPTCHA -- this is a service that provides Q&A style CAPTCHAs like "Which of 47, sixty two, 18 or 59 is the smallest?". Essentially, this isn't really different from the built-in Q&A CAPTCHA system, except this system has a large number of questions built already -- over 180 million. Q&As are potentially easier to solve for humans and have fewer accessibility issues, but the trade off is that they can possibly be machine read...
In recent videos, you will have seen me using the new Admin Control Panel search system in XenForo 1.1. This video takes you on a little tour of the ACP search system, and then gives a little tutorial aimed at helping add-on developers create ACP search modules for their own XenForo add-ons.
It also serves as an example of why I should not record 'Have You Seen' videos at 2am.
So you've got people to register on your forum and they've made their initial contribution, but once they've done that, how do you keep those members engaged and coming back to your forum? It's an age-old problem. A user registers, they may participate for a while if you're lucky, and then it's really a toss-up as to whether they will stay and become a semi-permanent fixture of your forum, or you never see them again.
Of all the challenges facing forum owners, this one requires the most creative approaches. There are various existing features that are geared towards keeping your members engaged. They can receive alerts, push notifications or emails when content is posted in threads or forums they watch, or you can manually email...
I've never hidden my frustrations with XF 1.1's editor (which is based on TinyMCE). In 1.2, we have entirely removed the existing editor and replaced it with a new one based on Redactor:
So obviously this looks quite a bit different--and I know plenty of people didn't like the 1.1 editor look--but the functionality is there. So what advantages do we have? Well there are various ones:
Much lighter code and faster to load. Redactor depends on jQuery and benefits from that.
When pasting, most formatting is removed (though some is kept). However, if you're pasting from one XenForo editor to another (or within the same one), all formatting is maintained.
White space is maintained for code tags when pasting from Webkit. This was an...
Well, here we are with our first Have you seen thread for XenForo 2.3.
It's been a long time coming, and for various reasons that we will go into later, it has changed quite a bit from what we had originally intended it to be, but it's finally ready to start showing you what's new.
tl;dr: there's a video at the end of this post.
Dark mode
A lot of the new stuff in XenForo 2.3 is related to performance improvements that won't be immediately apparent on first glance, but there is one new feature in particular that is very obvious, and that is the new dark mode.
If the device with which you are browsing a XenForo site is configured to use its own dark mode, XenForo will switch itself to use the dark theme. Alternatively...
Today marks the day when the alpha stage of XenForo 2.2 comes to an end and we mark that occasion by unleashing the first public beta. Look out for an announcement on that shortly.
Before that, however, we wanted to highlight a few more things that we've been working on over the last couple of weeks. Some of these you will be aware of as they have been running here for some time and we may have mentioned them elsewhere. Others are slightly more subtle...
Image and video improvements
Lazy loading
Last year Google paved the way for Native lazy loading images. Lazy loading images is a fantastic way to reduce page loading times and data usage as rather than loading all images on a page, it instead loads images as you scroll, just before...
1.1.4 includes some additional anti-spam options for the registration form. These are small enough improvements that they can be done for a 1.1.x release. You will see some deeper integration of additional tools (such as the previously-shown StopForumSpam) in 1.2. As always, targeted attacks may potentially be able to mitigate some anti-spam techniques.
Built-in Registration Timer
A registration timer system is now built-in to the registration form. For a valid user, they simply cannot submit the form until the time is up. If a person submits the form without waiting long enough, they will need to wait again until to submit the registration.
This can be configured in the admin control panel:
Unique Registration Key
This...
