XF 2.2 Forum and thread types

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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 forums to varying purposes

Over the years, forum administrators have been inventive and used the simple messages-in-named-containers structure of forums to build all sorts of content - let's look at the XenForo community as an example.

First, we have announcements and these "Have you seen" threads. These are quite focused on the initial post (or first few posts in some HYS threads), with these posts containing a lot of information... a bit like an article with subsequent comments.

Then we have the suggestions forums, where we ask people to up-vote the ideas they're interested in.

There are also support forums where people are looking for answers to questions or solutions to problems.

And of course there are also forums for general chat and discussions, which most closely fit the original notion of a discussion thread and where you can't really say the threads fit the same model as the other types.

Up until now, these forums and the threads within have all been displayed the same way.

But not any more

With XenForo 2.2, we are introducing the concept of Forum and thread types. This is a massive change with enormous ramifications for forums. Today, we're only really going to talk about the admin and user experience of the new systems, but in a few days we're going to follow up with a developer-focused HYS where we will talk about what's going on behind the scenes here, because we're really rather excited about the potential it unlocks.

There is a lot to talk about, but let's just dive into some examples...

tl;dr

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Threads will be converted to a valid type for that forum when they're moved. If the thread's type will be changed, we detect this on the move overlay and display a warning to make sure you mean this.
Nice! I think we'll create a Highlights forum where the forum's owner's posts will be featured, and we can simply move those over so they can be "converted" to articles. This is something I have wanted to do for a while.

How are custom thread fields affected? Do they also move over if the thread type changes?

And I do hope a third party developer takes note of these new thread/forum types and creates a really good Classifieds forum type. Talk about a perfect application for the new framework!
 
So I don't even have the new 2.2 version in my hands yet and I'm already planning changes we can make to the forums. 😁 That Articles forum and thread type is going to change how I set up forums from now on--it's a game changer for us.
 
Well, holy :poop:. You guys just gave admins limitless ways to present (group/create) content. I never seen this before, and never even considered this or thought it possible. XF just transformed forums to how they should be now, and how they should be into the future.

Question: Articles, suggestions, and question forums are not new node types right? They still fall under the forum node?
 
Well, holy :poop:. You guys just gave admins limitless ways to present (group/create) content. I never seen this before, and never even considered this or thought it possible. XF just transformed forums to how they should be now, and how they should be into the future.
Exactly!
 
Question regarding the question/answer thread type.
Can permission be set so that in addition to the original poster, mod/admin can select/change the best answer.
 
Had the team discussed on placing the vote block on the question forum to the left, and the posters info to the right side? Our eyes adjust naturally to the direction we read, so to me the vote score should be seen first, followed by the solution/best answer, and then the posters info (if one takes the time to look at it).
 
Had the team discussed on placing the vote block on the question forum to the left, and the posters info to the right side? Our eyes adjust naturally to the direction we read, so to me the vote score should be seen first, followed by the solution/best answer, and then the posters info (if one takes the time to look at it).
I think Avatar | Vote score | Answer should be how it is done which would align it with the normal threads more and keep the score on the left side. The voting score on the thread list is actually on the left which is the right choice. Inside threads in posts it should be between the avatar and the answer. Before the avatar it would make it look like we are voting for the user and not for the answer. Having it outside right is also not nice as I agree with you. So the only good option is between.
 
Als HYS so far seemed to be nice and welcomed improvements, but this is the first one that makes me fell WOW - great job :)

We've been unsing an internal thread types framework for quite some time already on a couple forums, but what has been shown so far seems to be buch more sophisticated and having support for threads types in core is awesome.
I can only try to imagine what cool thread types could be created, only the sky seems to be the limit ;)

Question
Will there be different permissions for different types, eg. would it be possible to allow some usergroups to post articles while others can only post discussions threads, allow some usergroups to only comment on articles, etc.?

Is pagination/table of contents for articles (first post of an article thread) planned?
 
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