Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
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.
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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...
Here at XenForo, we like to take controls that are infrequently used and tuck them neatly away so they don't get in the way of everyday browsing.
One example of this is the thread list display options, which could be presented as a big fat hairy form stuffed right under the thread list, or it could be gently placed inside a friendly little tab, ready to pop out whenever you need it.
We chose the latter.
You will have noticed that our primary navigation to access different areas of XenForo is a system of tabs in the header. Underneath each tab is a set of quick links to jump to various pages that exist within that section.
Have you noticed though, that if you move your mouse over an inactive tab, an area highlights on the right of the tab, and if you click or hover over that area, the quick links from within that tab open up in a drop-down menu?
Pages allow you to manage simple content in the node tree. Find out more here:
http://xenforo.com/community/pages/example-page/
The node list display could do with some improvements. We have some ideas about that.
The exact look of the auto-generated navigation is a work-in-progress as well. :)
There's an alternative way to find new content and keep up with what is going on with XenForo than clicking the 'What's new?' link.
If you click on the 'Members' tab, and then the 'Everyone's news feed' link, you will find the global activity stream. Everything that all members of the board does is published to the news feed. It's kinda fun to sit on that page and refresh from time to time to discover what people are doing and posting about.
In the beginning, dates next to content on the internet were ugly things. We used to see date/time strings like 07-29-2010 16:31 and that would be it.
Then, options were added to allow administrators to specify a date/time format, and you could see output such as 4:31pm, Thursday June 29th 2010.
Later still, it was possible to output times relative to the present, so one could see dates like 3 minutes ago or Yesterday at 6:15pm.
However, these relative dates can be nasty when it comes to anything that is going to cache the page output. If a search engine slurps up the page, its cache is going to forever be wrong, as it will be locked at 3 minutes ago even when the content is weeks old. This can also be a problem for long threads. By...
You may have noticed how the 'Reply' links on messages focus the quick reply editor, and pull in a quoted version of the message to which you are replying so that you can easily edit/trim your quote.
Have you also noticed however, that you are not limited to quoting a single message? You can click the 'reply' link on multiple messages and each of them will deliver their content to the quick reply box.
I say Multi-Quote (kinda) because at present this functionality is limited to messages on the same page, but I plan to allow this to operate across multiple pages in due course.
When reading a quoted a message, one often wants to go and read the original message in order to get the context of the posts around it.
XenForo enhances this functionality by detecting whether or not the quoted message is on the same page as the one you are viewing, and animating a move from the quote to the original message, so you get an idea of how many messages are inbetween the two and other visual cues.
You can see it in action here:
http://xenforo.com/community/posts/1107/
Click the little up arrow on that post, after 'Kier Said' to see the effect.
