XF 1.3 Google+/Twitter Registration, User Upgrade Logs, Censor Improvement

Let's look at a few more features coming in XenForo 1.3.

Google+ and Twitter Registration/Login

Like the Facebook registration/login that we've had, XenForo 1.3 will now support registering via Google+ or Twitter:

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The first time a user clicks one of those buttons, they'll be taken to the correct service to validate the request. They will then be redirected back to the forum. If they have already registered, they will be logged in automatically; otherwise, they will have the option to complete the registration or associate with an existing account.

Like with the existing Facebook integration, to use Twitter and Google+ registration, you will need to create the necessary "app" with their services and enter the public and private keys into your XenForo installation.

The Facebook Integration page has now been replaced with a generic External Accounts page that allows the user to manage their associations with external accounts. Add-on developers can now add their association controls to this page instead of creating a new page for each account.

Further, from a technical standpoint, the xf_user_profile table now has an external_auth field that maps provider keys to the provider ID. Inserting an external auth record will automatically update this. This field means that a dedicated column does not need to be added for each external authentication system.

User Upgrade Transaction Logs

To aid in debugging user upgrade problems, the transaction logs are now viewable from the control panel. Each time the payment processor (by default, only PayPal) makes a call to your server, this will be logged in the transaction log. If you are having problems with an upgrade not being triggered, the transaction log should tell you why.

First, you'll see an overview of the transactions:

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And you can dive into all the details for each call:

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If you're looking for a particular entry, you can use the search form to do this. Note that the transaction and subscriber IDs are values from PayPal, so they can often be used to relate a particular call to a log entry you're seeing in PayPal (or vice versa).

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Censor Improvement

Finally today, XenForo 1.3 has tweaked the censoring system to give you more control. Primarily, this is designed to workaround the "Scunthorpe problem"--you should see the issue right here until we roll out 1.3.

Previously, censoring was either an exact match or a match that occurred anywhere in the word. Now, you control whether the match is exact, at the beginning, at the end, or anywhere. This is done by placing * wildcard characters at the beginning or end as needed:
  • dog - matches exactly dog
  • dog* - matches any word starting with dog (dog, dogs, dogma, etc)
  • *dog - matches any word ending with dog (dog, hotdog, etc)
  • *dog* - matches any occurrence of dog (dog, dogs, hotdog... some word that has "dog" in the middle :))
This will make actual swear-based censoring more accurate as, in many cases, you would only want to put the wildcard at the end.



Stay tuned for more...
 
Nice. I, too, would like to see LinkedIn added. And if we're on it anyway, throw in Yahoo! as well :)

Regardless, one more add-on that can be binned.
 
Hopefully we can migrate easily from this addon to the core feature.

It probably won't be necessary.

If I recall, as long as the application ID and application secret for each service stays the same (and there's no reason why it can't), the authorisation process should be taken care of. e.g. Your user's social media accounts have already authorised your application, so at worst the user will have to re-login (as in click the "Login with X" button) to that service and it should plop a new authentication token in the new core system for handling that.

I agree with @Chris Deeming, I don't think the authentication tokens belong to the add on but rather to your site. Everything should be fine.
 
with external associations we will probably be allowed to add to that list ... please advise

This is answered in the first post:
Further, from a technical standpoint, the xf_user_profile table now has an external_auth field that maps provider keys to the provider ID. Inserting an external auth record will automatically update this. This field means that a dedicated column does not need to be added for each external authentication system.
 
it'd be nice if there was LinkedIn login too, in the future perhaps.
Agree. And Sina Weibo + vk.com too - These are biggest social networks around China and Russia... and many other countries that're speak these languages.
 
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I think extra sites for authentication can be added and fairly easily after these improvements? That's what I understood from the first post, so instead of having to add every possible social network as a option by default they give us the ability to add it ourselves, and I'm sure there will be plenty of add-on's built using the system in xenForo for other authentication ans associating other social networks.
 
It's not something you'd be able to do yourself unless you had the programming knowledge to do so.

It's not exactly difficult right now to add new authentication providers.
 
NOTE: I want to be able to utilize these new enhancements as website administrator without having to go ask developer to do it for me. It is simple enough just having to add secret keys and such after first having to create the apps at the social network of interest.
 
Well, 1.3 includes Facebook, Twitter and Google so for those you just need provider keys and secrets.

Any others you want adding cannot be done without writing new code.
 
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