Having upgraded XenForo.com yesterday, we've fielded lots of feedback and implemented a fair few changes.
Here's a handful of things we've done in response to your feedback.
Editor styling
We've removed the gradient entirely from the unfocused editor, and changed the styling when the editor is focused so that the background now gets lighter on focus, in order to give an editing background that is more like the final destination background.
XenForo 2.2 RTE unfocused
XenForo 2.2 RTE focused
We have also rolled out this change to all input fields across the entire system, changing from the approach we've used since XenForo 1.x, where the background would get darker on focus.
XenForo 1.x
XenForo 2.1
XenForo 2.2
Question thread...
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
We've spent the last few weeks talking about the new features in XenForo 2.2. Now, it's your first chance to try some of them out and help us put them through their paces. Welcome to XenForo 2.2! 👋
As you may notice, we have started converting some of our forums to more specific forum types. We've also enabled all general discussion thread types in the testing forum.
What's still to come
While our previous "have you seen" threads have announced most of what's coming in XenForo 2.2, we haven't touched on our official add-ons. There are improvements coming to each of them (beyond getting support for changes we already announced in 2.2), but we're not quite ready to announce these changes yet. Until we do, what you see running here is...
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...
The previous "have you seen" threads for 2.2 have generally been focused on what the changes mean to admins and end users. While we have made reference to some of the internal technical elements and what add-ons can do with these features, today we want to do a deeper dive into some of these changes from a development perspective.
What we're going to cover today is not an exhaustive list. No doubt you'll find other changes scattered throughout. Today we're just going to focus on some of the more significant or noteworthy changes.
So let's go!
Forums contain threads and threads contain posts. It's been the essential framework of forums on the Internet since the public migrated from usenet to the web.
The structure is well known and well understood - though the origins of some of the terminology are lost in the mists of time. Who ever came up with the notion of your site being a forum, but these separate containers for related threads also being forums? 🤷🏼♂️
But back on topic, and we all know that visiting a forum (the second type) will usually show a list of threads ordered with the most recently updated near the top, and that clicking on any of those threads will show a page with the oldest post first and newer posts underneath and on subsequent pages.
Bending discussion...
Central to the experience of interacting with forum software is the interface through which visitors will create their content. This is usually done through the text editor and attachment manager, so keeping these systems fresh and inspiring is very important to us.
From the outset, XenForo has employed a rich text editor (RTE) to allow visitors to compose their messages in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface, so that bold text is shown emboldened, large text is appropriately large etc., rather than working directly with the underlying BB code in order to take the guesswork out of message editing. We've always built a custom implementation on top of what we consider to be the best-in-class tools, and through the life of...
Everyday administrative housekeeping often requires direct interaction with your server's file system.
Installing or upgrading a style, switching out logo graphics and other images on your forum you will invariably require a dust-off for your rusty old FTP client and an exciting adventure into arcane directory structures in order to upload them manually, while desperately not trying to overwrite the server's kernel or otherwise accidentally lunch the normally smooth operation of your forum.
Booooooring!
We have already acknowledged that these archaic methods will no longer do. XenForo 2.1 removed many barriers in order to allow one-click upgrades and add-on installs/upgrades from archive to be performed directly from your admin...
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...
Mobile first. We hear it again and again, and with over half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, it's more important than ever to provide your mobile visitors with a great experience.
Of course, XenForo 2 is built on a fully responsive design that gracefully adapts to any display size and makes using XenForo a pleasure on all devices, but now we're taking it a step further by enabling any XenForo site to become a progressive web app.
Progressive web what?
Okay, let's back up a little. Imagine a technology that allows a web site to appear and behave like an app without having to produce native code for each platform, or go through any vendor's App Store equivalent.
Progressive web apps, or PWAs, aim to bridge the gap between...
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Participation. It's the life blood of a forum, and once you have a group of dedicated members creating and discussing content, your forum will flourish.
But there's a barrier to entry when it comes to participation. When a new visitor stumbles upon your forum from a search engine, they may read the content that piqued their interest and then feel inclined to add their own thought-provoking response, but at that point they are confronted with the dreaded
... at which point, in many cases, the whim disappears and they disappear like a stranger in the night.
The prospect of having to complete a form and go through the rigmarole of signing-up to a new service is quite a turn-off to new visitors, for obvious reasons. Visitors have a...
A new way to surface content
Forums are usually devoted to a single subject matter and the threads they contain relate to that subject matter, unless it's all gone wrong and your users are wandering off topic. Threads belong to their parent forums, so if your board separates posts about kittens from posts about puppies into separate forums, you are never going to see a kitten thread and a puppy thread sitting next to each other within your forum hierarchy. This is how it has always been, it's the basic nature of the discussion forum paradigm.
But what if you want to have a forum that contains all threads from across your entire board that were posted in the week before last, or all threads started by moderators, or all threads that...
Welcome to the first of our "Have you seen...?" (HYS) series for XenForo 2.2! To ensure you're kept up to date with future threads, we strongly recommend clicking the "Watch forum" link here and enabling email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂
Over the course of the next few weeks we would like to not only introduce you to the new features we've been working hard on for the next version of XenForo, but also introduce you to some new members of the XenForo team! We'll introduce those new team members in the upcoming HYS threads.
But first...
New minimum requirements
You might remember that we started requiring PHP 5.6 starting with the release of XenForo 2.1. We base decisions like this on the "anonymous usage statistics"...
