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
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
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...
Participation. It's the life blood of a forum, and once you have a group of dedicated members creating and discussing content, your forum will flourish.
But there's a barrier to entry when it comes to participation. When a new visitor stumbles upon your forum from a search engine, they may read the content that piqued their interest and then feel inclined to add their own thought-provoking response, but at that point they are confronted with the dreaded
... at which point, in many cases, the whim disappears and they disappear like a stranger in the night.
The prospect of having to complete a form and go through the rigmarole of signing-up to a new service is quite a turn-off to new visitors, for obvious reasons. Visitors have a...
Ahh, it seems like only yesterday (as I write this, it was!) we were talking about the fifth in our HYS series for XF 2.1, and already we're onto the sixth, so welcome! In case you've not yet seen the previous entries, (why not?!) you can check them out here.
As ever, to ensure you're kept up to date, we strongly recommend giving that "Watch forum" link a tickle and make sure you enable email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂
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...
Much of this information will be familiar to those who were following the development process over at the XF2 Demo Forums, but this is something of a ‘greatest hits’ list of some of the important changes and improvements to XenForo since the 1.x generation.
Greatly-enhanced mobile-friendly style
The new XenForo 2 style is the first thing you will notice in XF2. The entire style has been redesigned with a fresh new appearance, but also with mobile browsing at the forefront of the design. When the viewport shrinks, on-page content shrinks, shifts and reorganises itself automatically to optimise the browsing experience for small displays.
A sticky header automatically activates when the window is scrolled, allowing the most important...
Central to the experience of interacting with forum software is the interface through which visitors will create their content. This is usually done through the text editor and attachment manager, so keeping these systems fresh and inspiring is very important to us.
From the outset, XenForo has employed a rich text editor (RTE) to allow visitors to compose their messages in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface, so that bold text is shown emboldened, large text is appropriately large etc., rather than working directly with the underlying BB code in order to take the guesswork out of message editing. We've always built a custom implementation on top of what we consider to be the best-in-class tools, and through the life of...
A new way to surface content
Forums are usually devoted to a single subject matter and the threads they contain relate to that subject matter, unless it's all gone wrong and your users are wandering off topic. Threads belong to their parent forums, so if your board separates posts about kittens from posts about puppies into separate forums, you are never going to see a kitten thread and a puppy thread sitting next to each other within your forum hierarchy. This is how it has always been, it's the basic nature of the discussion forum paradigm.
But what if you want to have a forum that contains all threads from across your entire board that were posted in the week before last, or all threads started by moderators, or all threads that...
XenForo Resource Manager (XFRM) 2.2 sees a range of new features and improvements. Some of these are a result of new integrations with XenForo 2.2 itself, while others are exclusive new features to XFRM itself.
Resource teams
Software projects are often collaborative efforts, and even when they are not, there may be ancillary staff on hand to handle customer support and sales.
This fact is recognised in XFRM 2.2 with the advent of Resource teams.
After enabling the option through the admin control panel, resource owners will be able to delegate tasks to members of the team they define.
Team members may perform any action on a resource as though they were the owner, although deletion of the resource is reserved solely for the...
Today marks the day when the alpha stage of XenForo 2.2 comes to an end and we mark that occasion by unleashing the first public beta. Look out for an announcement on that shortly.
Before that, however, we wanted to highlight a few more things that we've been working on over the last couple of weeks. Some of these you will be aware of as they have been running here for some time and we may have mentioned them elsewhere. Others are slightly more subtle...
Image and video improvements
Lazy loading
Last year Google paved the way for Native lazy loading images. Lazy loading images is a fantastic way to reduce page loading times and data usage as rather than loading all images on a page, it instead loads images as you scroll, just before...
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...
Welcome to the first of our "Have you seen...?" (HYS) series for XenForo 2.2! To ensure you're kept up to date with future threads, we strongly recommend clicking the "Watch forum" link here and enabling email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂
Over the course of the next few weeks we would like to not only introduce you to the new features we've been working hard on for the next version of XenForo, but also introduce you to some new members of the XenForo team! We'll introduce those new team members in the upcoming HYS threads.
But first...
New minimum requirements
You might remember that we started requiring PHP 5.6 starting with the release of XenForo 2.1. We base decisions like this on the "anonymous usage statistics"...
We're fast approaching the time where we're able to unleash XenForo 2.2 on this very forum but, before we do, we wanted to tell you about a few slightly more miscellaneous features that we've been keeping under our hat.
Advanced options switch
The eagle-eyed amongst you may have already spotted some hints about this in some of our earlier screenshots. 🤫
XenForo has an ever-increasing number of options and then by the time you put add-on options in the mix, the options pages may start to feel somewhat daunting and unwieldy at times, especially for new admins to the platform. After all, there are nearly 200 options in XenForo alone.
We (and add-on developers) are now able to mark options or entire option groups as "advanced".
What...
