Have you seen...?

XenForo has always allowed members to switch the visibility of their online status, allowing them to browse without announcing their presence to other visitors. However, there are times when a person who normally browses in visible mode might want to quickly switch to invisible mode for a short time. Normally, this would involve a trip to the Privacy Settings editor, but it's now possible to switch the system on and off instantly with a single click in your visitor menu.

You've already seen how style properties provide a quick, easy, flexible and extensible way to control the appearance and behaviour of your styles. In this video, you'll see them at work again, this time working directly on element appearance and styling. The demo touches on our use of the color palette (which is of course extensible in its own right) and shows some basic use of our CSS editor. Enjoy! As usual, this is a large, HD video. View it at full size using the expand gadget in the bottom right of the movie frame.

By exposing code events and allowing listeners to attach to them, XenForo makes it easy to alter its default functionality with simple callback classes. The API for doing this is well-defined and documented, so modifications made in this way stand a very good chance of remaining backward compatible through future version updates. This video shows me creating a simple add-on that allows us to see how an existing thread would look with over a thousand pages. As usual, it's a large, HD video, so I suggest you view it at its original size by clicking the full-screen gadget in the bottom-right corner of the video. Edit: If for whatever reason you can't view the video here, view it directly on Vimeo (but please leave comments here, not...

When it comes to quickly and easily toggling the display or behaviour of user interface elements, it often makes sense to be able to pass simple parameters to the templates. XenForo provides a powerful and extensible system to allow variables to be defined and modified on a per-style basis, making this a breeze and opening the door for style customization by third-party add-ons. I suggest you view this video at full-size by clicking the full-screen gadget in the bottom-right of the video.

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.

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.

Well, you wouldn't have seen it because it's only exposed to moderators. :) Moderator actions are invoked using the moderator bar that is at the top of every page. In this post, I'll be focusing on how moderators handle reported content. Handling a report is a little more formalized than you might be used to. Reports are now tracked with a status, so that it's clear what has happened and, if you leave a comment, why. This bar makes it easy to see when you have tasks outstanding, but doesn't get in the way of reading the forum. Inside the reported items section, you are presented with a list of outstanding (open or assigned) reports: This does not just have to show a list of reported posts. It will show any type of comment...

You asked for them, so here they are.

Everybody loves quick reply. Most forum software has implemented it in some form these days, but it tends to be lacking some functionality that means you often have to drag yourself back to the full editor page to achieve what you want, especially when it comes to attaching files to your messages. XenForo allows you to upload files and place uploaded images into your posts right from the quick reply box when you're viewing a thread, you can then submit your message and it will be added to the discussion instantly. ... without ever leaving the page or opening a separate browser window. I suggest you view this video at full-size by clicking the full-screen gadget in the bottom-right of the video.

This isn't so much a 'have you seen this feature' post as one that goes some way to explaining why interacting with XenForo is such an immediate, pleasurable experience. The following is screen-grabbed from Google Webmaster Tools.

From the outset, XenForo has been built with semantic HTML in mind in order to facilitate styling, boost SEO and give a helping hand to screen reading software. The W3C provides a useful Semantic data extraction tool that allows the efficacy of this approach to be tested. Take a look at how easily the tool extracts the important content from an example thread here on XenForo.com: Semantic Data Extraction for 'Multi-page Navigation Enhancement' thread

Wherever* you see a username or an avatar in XenForo, clicking it will open that user's member card. The member card is a small summary of a user's profile, showing various commonly-viewed data, such as user title, gender, message count etc. along with the full size (but cropped to square) version of the user's avatar. Clicking on the username or the 'View Profile Page' link will load the user's full profile page. There are various useful links on the member card, including links to follow or unfollow the user, start a conversation with them, view their recently-posted messages, or see a summary of the trophies they have accumulated. Loading the member card rather than the full profile page can take a significant weight off the...

Many forum systems include a forum jump menu. This is usually a popup-menu that allows you to jump directly from one area of the site to another, when normally it would require several navigational steps. The forum jump menu tends to be implemented as a <select> element with javascript behaviour attached to it so that when you release the menu, you jump to the selected forum or site area. However, doing it like this has a few of fairly major down-sides. Firstly, in order to build the forum jump menu, the system needs to load theentire forum tree into memory and output it. On a board with a lot of forums, this can be quite an overhead. Secondly, the use of a <select> means that you are not able to choose how to access the areas...