An eagerly-awaited feature for XenForo 1.1, here is a first look at the new thread prefixes system, with a special guest appearance!
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
Today, we're continuing on with our look at some of the new features coming in the 1.1 release of the XenForo Resource Manager. Up next are 2 of the most common requests.
Note that as before, we're not running RM 1.1 here yet so you can't play with these just yet.
Resource Icons
In the current RM release, the icon that is displayed with a resource has simply been the avatar of the author. This has been used in resource lists and next to the title when viewing the resource itself. In 1.1, administrators can choose to let users upload unique icons for each resource instead, similar to what you might find in various app stores. The icon allows resource authors to have a space to add a quick, unique identifying element to their resource...
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...
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...
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 :)
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...
Welcome to a new series of Have You Seen videos, demonstrating some of the new features and improvements to come in XenForo 1.1.
First on the list: Notices.
http://vimeo.com/27033663
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...
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.
Welcome to XenForo 2.1!
We said there would be something special accompanying the final HYS in this series for XF 2.1, and here it is. This is your first opportunity to help us put the new feature set through its paces.
We also said there would be a number of other miscellaneous changes/improvements to show you, so read on for more 👇
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!
Every forum system needs a good collection of tools to allow moderators to keep the board running smoothly.
With XenForo, we have looked at how this has been done in the past and come up with some new concepts and standards to make the job easier, such as the placement of the inline moderation checkbox right by thread titles, an inline editor for threads and a control panel that follows you around.
I suggest you view this video at full-size by clicking the full-screen gadget in the bottom-right of the video.
A long time ago, in a forum not particularly far, far away (may the fourth be with you), we produced a series of videos showing off how easy it was to build rich pages with XenForo's templates and javascript framework.
While many of the principles demonstrated in these videos remain a key part of XenForo 2, most of the syntax employed by XenForo 1 back then has changed, and there are many more tools at your disposal, like entities and command-line functions.
Building with XenForo 2
Alongside the release of XenForo 2.2.5, it seemed a good time to put together a new series, rounding up all of the key parts of XenForo add-on development, starting with the basic steps of creating a new add-on and moving on to the template system, working...
