Have you seen...?

In the beginning, XenForo Enhanced Search (XFES) was intended to be a simple drop-in replacement for MySQL full text search, primarily aimed at large forums whose operation would potentially suffer when attempting to search very large database tables. As a drop-in, XFES only made use of the enhanced search index and speed for the formal search system, but with version 2.2 we are starting to leverage more of the power afforded by the Elasticsearch back-end. Similar threads A useful tool for surfacing content on your forum is a list of Similar or related threads, which can be displayed along with a primary thread. Visitors who have landed on that page from a search engine will often look for related material to continue their reading...

As promised, this week we're going to take a quick look at some of the more developer-centric changes coming in XenForo 2.3. If a certain topic interests you more than others, click one of the links below: JavaScript SwiftMailer to Symfony Mail Doctrine Cache to Symfony Cache Updated Emogrifier Registry preload event Native IP conversion methods Support for class strings Updates to <time> tags - short date format Template names in HTML output AbstractCollection nth method Smart Javascript cache buster XF.createElement Template macro syntax changes Direct messages Please note that the following libraries are no longer bundled with XF 2.3: ccampbell/chromephp doctrine/cache league/flysystem-ziparchive swiftmailer/swiftmailer...

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...

It's finally here! Today we are pleased to mark the next major milestone towards a stable release of XenForo 2.3 and this time we need your help! As per the announcement XenForo 2.3 Beta 1 is now available to all licensed self-hosted customers. We'd very much appreciate your thoughts, your feedback, and your uncanny ability to break things in ways we can't even imagine. But, as ever, please do not even contemplate installing it on your live forum at this point. There will be bugs; some of which we know about and are yet to be fixed, and others which are yet to be discovered. No support is provided for Beta releases aside from saying "we told you so" and advising you to restore from a backup! 😉 Please for goodness sake, take a backup...

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...

We did say we'd see you again fairly soon and so here we are, hot on the heels of our push notifications announcement, to bring you an update on several more new features and improvements coming in XenForo 2.1. Remember, to ensure you're kept up to date, we strongly recommend smashing the "Watch forum" link here and enabling email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂

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...

Everyday administrative housekeeping often requires direct interaction with your server's file system. Installing or upgrading a style, switching out logo graphics and other images on your forum you will invariably require a dust-off for your rusty old FTP client and an exciting adventure into arcane directory structures in order to upload them manually, while desperately not trying to overwrite the server's kernel or otherwise accidentally lunch the normally smooth operation of your forum. Booooooring! We have already acknowledged that these archaic methods will no longer do. XenForo 2.1 removed many barriers in order to allow one-click upgrades and add-on installs/upgrades from archive to be performed directly from your admin...

Mobile first. We hear it again and again, and with over half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, it's more important than ever to provide your mobile visitors with a great experience. Of course, XenForo 2 is built on a fully responsive design that gracefully adapts to any display size and makes using XenForo a pleasure on all devices, but now we're taking it a step further by enabling any XenForo site to become a progressive web app. Progressive web what? Okay, let's back up a little. Imagine a technology that allows a web site to appear and behave like an app without having to produce native code for each platform, or go through any vendor's App Store equivalent. Progressive web apps, or PWAs, aim to bridge the gap between...

Welcome to another HYS for 2.1 and this one's a biggie. If you haven't seen the previous entries about what's coming in XF 2.1, check them out here. Although Halloween may be over, why not trick the "Watch forum" link into giving you a treat, by getting it send you an email whenever we post about new things in the pipeline. As I write this, our most popular suggestion was a REST API and with 2.1, it's here. While this is a fairly developer-focused feature on its own, it opens up many more integration options. This will make it easier to get data into or out of XenForo, without having to understand the underlying PHP framework that XF is built on. The API breaks down into a few distinct components, so let's look at those in turn.

Welcome to the first of our "Have you seen...?" series for XenForo 2.1. We've got a lot to show you over the course of the next few weeks so you may well be hearing from us quite frequently... To ensure you're kept up to date, we strongly recommend clicking the "Watch forum" link here and enabling email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂 But first... The first thing that we should announce before we get started is something which we have talked about over the last year which is related to the minimum server requirements of XenForo 2.1. XenForo 2.0 currently requires a minimum of PHP 5.4, but with XenForo 2.1 we are increasing this to a minimum of PHP 5.6. Now, PHP 5.6 is still pretty old by today's standards, so you may be...

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

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...