What single 'new feature' would benefit xenForo customers most?

Rob

Rob

Well-known member
As the flow of bugs and fixes begins to subside work will no doubt commence on a feature building release. Some already released mods will I'm sure end up being adopted into the base code and we all hope some ideas from the suggestions forum are tagged for inclusion too.

Hopefully this thread will spark a discussion of ideas that will most improve the customisability of xenForo.

For me, I think the single most powerful addition to make would be 'custom thread fields'. If this were done in such a way as to allow the definition of content types, to extend 'threads' with additional fields then we could specify which forums use which content types.... and which templates a content type should use. This will open up a huge realm of possible customisations to the forum owner.

What ideas do you have?
 
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Awesome-o said:
If I can have a single sign-on, I can have 10 more licenses immediately.

All of them need the custom thread field by forum, also.

This would be a gold mine.
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Yeah, I'd probably buy 4-6 if it had this. As it is now I'm trying to decide between XF and IPB. I know IPB has the feature but I would prefer to use XF if it had it.
 
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My 30 million users would prefer to use one login (thanks to OpenID) across all of our sites and services.

A lot of services are OpenID providers. It seems like a commonly requested feature that would benefit a lot of sites. As far as I'm aware, only one forum software package offers OpenID support. Unfortunately for me, that package is not vBulletin.
 
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don't get me wrong, full OpenID implementation would be great to have, but if I make a thread in my largest community (maybe 1.7 million posts) saying they can sign-on to all our sites using OpenID, they'll ask, "what's that?"

If I say, now you can access all of our boards with your credentials from this, the mother board, they'll mostly all get it and use it.

(that isn't the converse! we both want the same thing)
 
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You have confused me.

You said "My users aren't going to take to OpenID like they would a simple solution across my network of related sites" suggesting that OpenID isn't that simple solution to unify logins. But it is. Your second post seems to acknowledge this.

How you choose to market it to your users isn't really relevant - I'm sure you will be able to do that just fine :) What is important is having a robust solution that makes the most sense.
 
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tonjohn said:
You said "My users aren't going to take to OpenID like they would a simple solution across my network of related sites" suggesting that OpenID isn't that simple solution to unify logins. But it is. Your second post seems to acknowledge this.
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It's simple for you and me. It is unknown to the vast majority of my users.
 
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Your users don't need to know about it. All they need to know is "hey, you can now sign in with this one login!"

You can be your own OpenID provider. Alternatively, you could use another OpenID provider. Say you run a gaming forum, with OpenID integration your users would be able to login to your site with their Steam account credentials. They don't need to that it is OpenID that allows this. All they need to know is that they can now login w/ Steam (and thats pretty awesome if you're a PC gamer).
 
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Awesome-o said:
If I can have a single sign-on, I can have 10 more licenses immediately.

All of them need the custom thread field by forum, also.

This would be a gold mine.
Click to expand...

Yah, I think custom thread and custom profile fields are must for any site wanting to be more tailored to it's audience..... and who doesnt want to do that?

Cue Kier, 'yeah Rob, stop going on about that mod' :)
 
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Awesome-o said:
don't get me wrong, full OpenID implementation would be great to have, but if I make a thread in my largest community (maybe 1.7 million posts) saying they can sign-on to all our sites using OpenID, they'll ask, "what's that?"

If I say, now you can access all of our boards with your credentials from this, the mother board, they'll mostly all get it and use it.

(that isn't the converse! we both want the same thing)
Click to expand...

It not a huge task to develop an OpenID implementation - it's by and large the same functionality as face book login. However, as I understand it you would still need a profile on each board - that profile would authenticate using Open ID and essentially bypass the in built user / pass authentication but it would still have a native profile. However, you are not wanting OpenID.... you want something infinitely harder to implement.

It seems to me Awesome-o that the solution you want isnt going to be found easily. If your sites are as big as you make them out to be then how on earth will you deal with the mammoth amount of user name clashes you will inevitably have to deal with when merging account data from multiple boards?? How will a user's profile be viewed?? Locally?.... or on some central website? There will be a neeed for a central repository of user accounts - every website will need to query this when logging in, creating new accounts (to check for dupes), merging users, etc.... that repository will need to maintain integrity in each data subset on all websites so that deleting or merging a user is handled appropriately across the numerous satellite sites....

Actually, the more I think about your request the more I am seeing it as a HUGE task - way beyond what should be supported in the base code (at least at this stage)... and easily enough work to warrant dumping the idea and going with a far simpler solution. Eyes peeled for OpenID then :)
 
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If you can program it to wake me up in a morning, do me some tea & toast, drive me to work, do my work for the day, drive me home, cook my tea, an show my favourite tv shows for the day - then that would be the feature that would benefit me most. :D
 
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Rob said:
It not a huge task to develop an OpenID implementation - it's by and large the same functionality as face book login. However, as I understand it you would still need a profile on each board - that profile would authenticate using Open ID and essentially bypass the in built user / pass authentication but it would still have a native profile. However, you are not wanting OpenID.... you want something infinitely harder to implement.

It seems to me Awesome-o that the solution you want isnt going to be found easily. If your sites are as big as you make them out to be then how on earth will you deal with the mammoth amount of user name clashes you will inevitably have to deal with when merging account data from multiple boards?? How will a user's profile be viewed?? Locally?.... or on some central website? There will be a neeed for a central repository of user accounts - every website will need to query this when logging in, creating new accounts (to check for dupes), merging users, etc.... that repository will need to maintain integrity in each data subset on all websites so that deleting or merging a user is handled appropriately across the numerous satellite sites....

Actually, the more I think about your request the more I am seeing it as a HUGE task - way beyond what should be supported in the base code (at least at this stage)... and easily enough work to warrant dumping the idea and going with a far simpler solution. Eyes peeled for OpenID then :)
Click to expand...

I think the majority of us wants a single central user management only because if we have siteA, siteB, siteC, and siteD, we'll know that regardless of which site we are a part of, the user "Rob" is always going to be user "Rob". not "Robbie", or "Robert", or "Roberta".
 
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ManagerJosh said:
I think the majority of us wants a single central user management only because if we have siteA, siteB, siteC, and siteD, we'll know that regardless of which site we are a part of, the user "Rob" is always going to be user "Rob". not "Robbie", or "Robert", or "Roberta".
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Not only that but for people whom build communities doesn't it make sense to make it easy for people to pass from one community to the next? Likewise, if I built forum software, doesn't it make sense for me to build features that make it easier to sell more copies?
 
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User-customizable profiles. My users loved, and miss this. And a profile mp3 player. It was far from being a myspace clutter of useless trash only the blind could appreciate, some of my members had awesome looking profiles created. VB4 brought it back because it was so popular and asked for (contrary to opinions here by a vocal minority.)
 
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id love more auth options, twitter and google especially.
the ability in the node prefs to check 'twitter' for example and have that nodes feed fed to twitter, including a definable #hash-tag
a mobile theme
custom profile fields
finer-grained usergroup perms, such as the ability to allow/deny abilities to use the homepage userfield
the ability to create more 'like' buttons, and name them how i wish (even if they have zero effect on trophies and whatnot)
ability for a user to recolour their profile page, and use that scheme as their personal default style on the entire board.

my #1 wish is still a comprehensive ignore/block feature though.
 
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