Have you seen...?

We're approaching the conclusion of the 'Have you seen...?' series for XenForo 2.3. While it may seem like a bittersweet moment, we've intentionally saved one of the most exciting revelations until last. In the upcoming weeks, we might delve into a few more miscellaneous changes and improvements and provide a more developer-centric round up. However, our primary goal is to have XenForo 2.3 up and running on XenForo.com by the end of November. Beyond that milestone, we're excited to share a couple more surprises with you, which will include an overview of the latest enhancements in XenForo Resource Manager, Enhanced Search, and Media Gallery 2.3. But, back to today, and not only is this an exciting revelation, but it also signals the...

This week, we're delighted to introduce a new feature in XenForo 2.3 that enhances the way you can share content on your forum. Plus, we'll show you how easy it is to share any content from your forum to other platforms using our new content embedding feature. Rich previews for content If you're already familiar with URL unfurling, content embedding works similarly. In XenForo 2.2, when you post a link to content on your forum, we perform an HTTP request, download a portion of the content, and extract metadata such as the page title, description, and a logo. If you need a refresher on URL unfurling, you can find our original announcement from XenForo 2.1 here...

Due to time constraints and family matters, this is a slightly different HYS to what was planned, but it is still a bumper feast of new features coming in XenForo 2.3. This week we will be mostly focusing on a bunch of smaller new changes and improvements we're no less excited to show you in the near future. This is a somewhat lengthy post so we will say goodbye here and we will see you for more 2.3 goodies next week. Sign in with Apple To join our existing suite of connected account providers, in XenForo 2.3 we are adding support for Sign in with Apple. The set up for this one will be a little more onerous, requiring an Apple developer account and the creation of a certificate file that will need to be uploaded through our UI...

In what is probably one of the worst kept secrets in XenForo 'Have you seen...?' history, the eagle eyed amongst you may have picked up on one or two... or three... clues that we may be talking about this soon, and the day has finally arrived! Today we're excited to show you our take on the highly requested webhook implementation in XenForo. For those of you who haven't heard of webhooks before, they are a powerful utility that allow one application or service to send information to another when certain events occur. These can be everyday actions such as when making a payment for access to a product or service, or more specific implementations such as having a new Thread from your forum posted to Discord automatically. It is likely...

Image optimization with WebP support Arguably, we could have talked about this in our bumper Boosting performance entry but it wasn't quite ready to be shown at that point. (I started working on it this week and I haven't yet mastered the art of time travel). Initially the scope of our WebP support in XenForo 2.3 was to merely allow users to upload WebP files and have them correctly displayed inline. This would have been a positive change on its own as the format becomes more prevalent across the web, but it doesn't really do much on its own to solve the issue of disk usage which, of course, then also has a positive effect on performance. But, this wasn't enough. If you wish to optimize, automatically, all future image uploads you...

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...

In today's 'Have you seen...?' entry for XenForo 2.3 we're going to look at how we've zeroed in on enhancing performance, ensuring your community has a swift and seamless experience. We're going to take a deep dive into the advancements we've made and how they stack up against various performance metrics. But, before we get into the individual changes, let's take a quick look at the baseline - this is our current Performance score as calculated by Lighthouse for the XenForo Community forum list: Here's the performance scores for some other forum software: It's crucial to note that while this score provides a performance benchmark, it isn't the only indicator of success. Indeed, results can fluctuate slightly with multiple test...

Well, here we are with our first Have you seen thread for XenForo 2.3. It's been a long time coming, and for various reasons that we will go into later, it has changed quite a bit from what we had originally intended it to be, but it's finally ready to start showing you what's new. tl;dr: there's a video at the end of this post. Dark mode A lot of the new stuff in XenForo 2.3 is related to performance improvements that won't be immediately apparent on first glance, but there is one new feature in particular that is very obvious, and that is the new dark mode. If the device with which you are browsing a XenForo site is configured to use its own dark mode, XenForo will switch itself to use the dark theme. Alternatively...

Over the next few weeks, we'll be adding to the Building with XenForo 2 video series, starting today with a look at how to make your custom add-on content taggable! Part 15 - Implementing tagging Part 16 - Busting out of the PAGE_CONTAINER Part 17 - Building a filterable admin control panel list

With the publication of our Building with XenForo 2 video series, we've received various questions about a presenting broad overview of the XenForo architecture as a jumping-off point for would-be developers who want to know roughly what's going on behind the scenes. Therefore, with dubious penmanship, we've put together a ten minute overview of how XenForo works. Presenting ideas like the Router, Controller Actions and Replies before handing off to the Renderer, this overview aims to clear up some of the MVC mystery. This video is meant to be representative rather than literal, and to show some of the flow of execution rather than to accurately represent how various systems interact, but as a something that can be presented in...

A long time ago, in a forum not particularly far, far away (may the fourth be with you), we produced a series of videos showing off how easy it was to build rich pages with XenForo's templates and javascript framework. While many of the principles demonstrated in these videos remain a key part of XenForo 2, most of the syntax employed by XenForo 1 back then has changed, and there are many more tools at your disposal, like entities and command-line functions. Building with XenForo 2 Alongside the release of XenForo 2.2.5, it seemed a good time to put together a new series, rounding up all of the key parts of XenForo add-on development, starting with the basic steps of creating a new add-on and moving on to the template system, working...

Here at XenForo, we like to keep our development environments up-to-date and as useful as possible, and from time to time we include some of our findings in our online documentation. Recently, we've published an easy setup guide for a Windows-based development environment and now we've added both a guide for building a very flexible macOS-based system and instructions for setting-up a similar multi-PHP deployment in Linux. Multiple, simultaneous PHP versions The macOS and Linux installation guides bring the ability to simultaneously run multiple versions of PHP with Xdebug without having to switch the active version. This can be invaluable for developers who want to build new code with PHP 8, but also want to maintain add-ons...

When we first announced support for article-type threads and forums, we noted that this was an initial foray and that revised styling was in the pipeline. Today, we can show you some of those revisions and the options that come with them. Revised article styling Firstly, we have some updates for the main article thread page. The author section at the bottom of the article has had some attention to visually separate it a little more from the article body, and in order to provide a bit more meat for search engines to bite into, the author's about text is rendered underneath their name too. As articles can be very long, we also show the author's name in the attribution bar at the top of the article too, along with the number of comments...