XF 2.3 Featuring content

While the first few 'Have you seen...?' posts for XenForo 2.3 have focused on mostly aesthetic or performance changes, today we are taking the opportunity to talk about one of the first new major pieces of functionality we've been working on. Every release cycle we like to focus on at least one significant feature related to content discovery and 2.3 is no different with the introduction of what we are calling Featured content.

"But wait, don't we already have featured resources?"

Indeed we do but the ability to feature resources is now joined by threads, media items, and practically any content type you fine developers out there add support for or, naturally, content types we may add ourselves in the future.

Let's take a look at the process of featuring a thread!

The first question I expect some of you will have is "am I able to automatically feature threads?". And the answer is, yes! When editing any forum, under the "Advanced options" for each forum, there is now a new checkbox that enables you to do just that:

If you have a forum that acts somewhat as a latest news/article style forum, having the ability to automatically feature all threads created in that forum will enable you to more easily showcase important threads to your members.

Similar settings can be found in resource categories and media categories:

You can, of course, be much more selective about which content you would like to feature. But, first, let's look at the permissions surrounding that.

As you might expect, these permissions can be granted on a per-node/category basis as well, allowing you to delegate the featuring permissions to any moderator in control of any forum.

When a moderator is granted permission to feature content, they will find the link to do that typically in the "More options..." menu along with other moderation related options:

You will then be presented with a confirmation overlay. At this point, featuring the content really is as simple as clicking "Feature":

But, before it is featured, you might want to make a few changes. Clicking "Customize" will expand the overlay to reveal a few more options:

While these options are automatically inferred from the content when featuring by default, you can, if you wish, choose a different title, a custom snippet and even upload a custom cover image for the featured item.

If you need to make changes to any of these settings at any time, you can do so by following the same process as when you added the featured content, this time by clicking the "Manage feature" option in the "More options..." menu.

From here you can modify the title, snippet or feature image at any time. You can, of course, also unfeature the content too.

Content is ordered by the date each item was featured. In order to fine tune the ordering, you can simply modify the featured date.

In terms of displaying featured content, there is a number of options available. The most prevalent and default view of featured content is via a new tab on the "What's new" pages.

This is formatted very similarly to the "preview" style of the article forums, displaying a prominent title and image.

The list can also be filtered by specific content types:

The other methods of displaying featured content is, of course, done via widgets. So let's take a look at the new "Featured content" widget:

When adding a widget in the usual way, these are the options you are presented with. Pictured above are the typical settings for displaying featured resources in a carousel as we do in XFRM 2.2 on the resource overview page.

The options surrounding "context" here mean that widgets can use page context that is available in some widget positions in order to filter the results. For example, if you add the widget to a forum or thread related widget position, with the context options enabled in the widget you will only see featured threads in that specific forum.

The display styles should be very familiar at this point as they mirror similar settings for other widgets. But here's a visual overview:

Simple​

Perfect for smaller spaces, such as sidebars:

Standard​

Best suited for wider spaces, and would be perfect for use on a page node or similar to make your own portal style page:

Carousel​

This is display which is best used to showcase a number of items of content in a relatively small space, it automatically cycles through the content making it a little more visually striking:

That's all for this week! Please tell us below how you'll be using Featured content when you upgrade to XenForo 2.3 in the near future.

Unfortunately, there's no tl;dr video this week due to a little bit of an incident at @Kier HQ.

Stay tuned for next week where we'll be showcasing even more new functionality coming soon in XenForo 2.3.

 

[Kevin]

There isn't. What more do you all need? Home page functionality is really something XF has had for years, enhanced over the last few with features like article forums and this.

Anything on your forum can already be your index page, you can construct a home page out of widgets and the page node system, the navigation tab system can point to a specific forum, such as an article forum, which can be your home page.

Perhaps a more specific suggestion is warranted but I don't currently see much more to do in that area.

"There isn't." would have been sufficient to confirm no changes. Not sure why you feel a need for snarky answers.

 

[Alpha1]

This is really nice.

Question: For how long is it featured? Forever or is there an automatic Unfeature function that sets in after X days?

Suggestion: Featured content would be highly enhanced if there would be criteria that we can set to automatically feature content.
You don't want just any rubbish thread or article a member posts to become automatically featured. But its nice to feature quality popular content.

If it is an article forum, then you would at least want to it to have an image or otherwise it will look ugly. And it featured content goes to the home page, then it could make the home page look ugly.
For threads you would not want threads from a newbie with 5 words in the OP, lots of dislikes and no replies to be automatically featured. Criteria like number of replies would be very useful.
And if criteria would exist then criteria from other plugins like @Xon 's word count would be very useful.

 

[Chris D]

"There isn't." would have been sufficient to confirm no changes. Not sure why you feel a need for snarky answers.

There was no snark, Kevin. Now I know you prefer short, terse answers, I'll remember that for the future instead of explaining with time and detail.

 

[PrettyPixels]

Very happy with this new feature! Thank you!

 

[Chris D]

This is really nice.

Question: For how long is it featured? Forever or is there an automatic Unfeature function that sets in after X days?

Forever unless you unfeature.

Suggestion: Featured content would be highly enhanced if there would be criteria that we can set to automatically feature content. You don't want just any rubbish thread or article a member posts to become automatically featured. But its nice to feature quality popular content.
If it is an article forum, then you would at least want to it to have an image or otherwise it will look ugly. And it featured content goes to the home page, then it could make the home page look ugly.
For threads you would not want threads from a newbie with 5 words in the OP, lots of dislikes and no replies to be automatically featured. Criteria like number of replies would be very useful.
And if criteria would exist then criteria from other plugins like @Xon 's word count would be very useful.

I tend to agree, though there's certainly some uses where automatic featuring is fine, such as if it's a forum that only certain authors post in anyway.

For now, featuring in other scenarios, the criteria would have to be judged manually and featured manually if moderator/staff saw fit. These are interesting suggestions though which I expect will make their way to the suggestions forum at some point

 

[Stuart Wright]

Can this be used to feature threads above the thread list like the Theme House Feature Thread addon which we use?
Advertisers pay us to feature their messages above threads in relevant forums so it's very important functionality for us.
Here is how we use it

 

[Chris D]

Yep you can put the featured thread widget above the thread list.

 

[Alpha1]

Thank for explaining. I hope that criteria will be added as its something that many will want.

Forever unless you unfeature.

Being able to set a feature time expiry like @Paul B 's addon had would be really useful. Otherwise you end up with a lot of content that needs to manually be unfeatured by staff. We need easier administration. Not more manual work. As I am lazy I would simply not automatically feature anything in order to avoid that work.

 

[Stuart Wright]

Yep you can put the featured thread widget above the thread list.

Awesome, and can threads be set (by the creator) to be featured and unfeatured automatically on specific date times?
[Edit: cross posted with @Alpha1]

 

[benFF]

Carousel
This is display which is best used to showcase a number of items of content in a relatively small space, it automatically cycles through the content making it a little more visually striking:

Are there widget options for the carousel?

For example just showing the cover image and no text, amount of items etc etc.

 

[beerForo]

Will Search Forums be able to pull an "Is Featured" thread?

 

[Alpha1]

Awesome, and can threads be set (by the creator) to be featured and unfeatured automatically on specific date times?
[Edit: cross posted with @Alpha1]

I think many people will need this.

 

[Chris D]

Are there widget options for the carousel?

For example just showing the cover image and no text, amount of items etc etc.

The options are shown in the OP. There's no controls for those things specifically but they're trivially achievable with CSS. Even the number of "slides per page" so changing it from 2 per page, to 3 or more, or 1 per page is pretty much one line of CSS these days.

 

[Wildcat Media]

Shame that I still see what seems to be the same old What's New page though with divided content behind tabs :\ I was really hoping for a revamped page.

There are still some HYS posts to follow. Maybe we'll be surprised?

On the What's New page, I've been hoping for a Trending page, widget, or tab. On a really busy forum, there is too much activity for simply viewing newest threads and posts. A native Trending list works a little better in that context. (I think I've had an open suggestion for it.)

 

[benFF]

The options are shown in the OP. There's no controls for those things specifically but they're trivially achievable with CSS. Even the number of "slides per page" so changing it from 2 per page, to 3 or more, or 1 per page is pretty much one line of CSS these days.

Ah yes, I forgot we can target widgets by css class

 

[Chris D]

Actually targeting is done with data attributes more specifically, e.g.

[data-widget-key="name_of_widget"]
{
    // do things
}

But, yes, simple enough.

 

[Forsaken]

There are still some HYS posts to follow. Maybe we'll be surprised?

On the What's New page, I've been hoping for a Trending page, widget, or tab. On a really busy forum, there is too much activity for simply viewing newest threads and posts. A native Trending list works a little better in that context. (I think I've had an open suggestion for it.)

I don't imagine they would completely change the What's New system until 3.0 if they do end up doing that.

 

[Netkreatif]

Nice feature. Thanks

 

[Wildcat Media]

I might use this Feature Content feature, although in my case I have been working at doing the same with a combination of a "search forum" and specific thread prefixes we already use regularly, which would make our features automatic. The only thing I don't have is a way to display a search forum with the "preview" style available in article forums, so this with its extra features as a widget might be more attractive for what we need.

Question--will there be some sort of checkbox when creating a thread where thread/article creators can select to feature the content?


Also, a slight discrepancy (not related to a stunt double, alas):

Which renders:

Hopefully a fix for this is in the works. One reason I've held off using the article preview in thread listings is due to the preview not rendering line breaks, BBCode, etc., as the results look a proper mess or at best, nonsensical on the finished page (such as when writing a title of a work in italics, highlighting a link, or otherwise separating content which should not be run together). I think one of us has had a suggestion open for this issue. Or at the very least, some minor modification we can make in CSS/LESS or a template edit to fix it would help us.

 

[Miri]

The first question I expect some of you will have is "am I able to automatically feature threads?". And the answer is, yes!

When I caught a glimpse of the screenshot from the previous tutorial, we had suspected something like this. To be honest, we had imagined something static and tedious, thinking we would have to manually insert the content, and that you wouldn't go so in-depth by adding the option of dynamic content. This is fantastic. Thank you! I can't wait for it to be released to play around with it and feel like a real web developer in building my homepage.