Have you seen...?

Anyone who has developed add-ons for XenForo 1.1 knows that template hooks are a pain. They're a pain for us too, to say the least. Plenty of people have installed the Template Modification System add-on. We've been planning a TMS-like system for some time, before the XenForo add-on was ever actually released. XenForo 1.2 will deprecate the template hook system and introduce it's own template modification system to make it easier for add-on developers to change templates. Note that I'm primarily focused on add-on developers here. It is possible to create your own custom template modifications if you're not an add-on developer, but unless you have multiple styles, I'd recommend just making the changes to the templates directly. Let's...

As with many of our previous releases, XenForo 1.4 is adding more options to help prevent spam from being posted on your forum. Our focus here is mostly directed towards preventing automated bot registrations. Additional CAPTCHA Types Out of the box, we now support a number of additional CAPTCHA providers: Text CAPTCHA -- this is a service that provides Q&A style CAPTCHAs like "Which of 47, sixty two, 18 or 59 is the smallest?". Essentially, this isn't really different from the built-in Q&A CAPTCHA system, except this system has a large number of questions built already -- over 180 million. Q&As are potentially easier to solve for humans and have fewer accessibility issues, but the trade off is that they can possibly be machine read...

Post edit history and logging has been one of the most requested features and it will be a core feature in XenForo 1.2. Post Edit Logging Post edit logging is the simpler of the two features. It adds an indication to the post when it has been edited. We have intentionally kept this feature simple for the average user. They have no reason that they have to enter; if they're inclined, they can always include the reason in the message. We do track the last person to edit the message, but this is not displayed. It could be easily added with an add-on. In most cases, the last edit will be by the owner and the average user likely doesn't care about who edited it. If a moderator needs to know, the history gives much more detailed...

Some of you may have spotted this in a previous Have You Seen, but today we're going to look at XenForo 1.3's custom BB code support in detail. At a high level, custom BB codes let you define BB codes to fit your site's needs. This allows you to give your users more options for mark up, without opening up arbitrary HTML and the various issues (security and otherwise) that come with that. A BB code may take an "option" parameter if needed, such as in .... Basic Options Let's look at the main BB code creation form. It's a biggie: This is just the "basic" fields. We'll get into the advanced stuff in a bit. Many of these fields should be self explanatory. The title/description mostly relate to the help page, as well the example...

XenForo 1.3 also contains a number of changes and improvements to help moderators. Let's look at some of them... Reporting a User While this isn't related to an action a moderator would take themselves, users can now be reported directly from their profile. This can be used for users that haven't posted any content, but may have an inappropriate avatar, signature, or other value. Thread Moderator Action History Moderators can now view all moderator-level actions taken in a thread from a new option in the Thread Tools menu: This will display an overlay like this: Moving Posts to an Existing Thread When moving posts via inline moderation, they can now be moved to an existing thread by simply providing the URL to that thread...

I've never hidden my frustrations with XF 1.1's editor (which is based on TinyMCE). In 1.2, we have entirely removed the existing editor and replaced it with a new one based on Redactor: So obviously this looks quite a bit different--and I know plenty of people didn't like the 1.1 editor look--but the functionality is there. So what advantages do we have? Well there are various ones: Much lighter code and faster to load. Redactor depends on jQuery and benefits from that. When pasting, most formatting is removed (though some is kept). However, if you're pasting from one XenForo editor to another (or within the same one), all formatting is maintained. White space is maintained for code tags when pasting from Webkit. This was an...

Welcome to the first Have You Seen thread for XenForo 1.5. Over the next few weeks, we'll be posting more of these to show you how the new features in XenForo 1.5 are going to work. We expect to install XenForo 1.5 on XenForo.com for initial testing by early July, with a public beta process to follow. Today, we're going to look at the responsive admin control panel. XenForo 1.2 made the public-facing components fully responsive, supporting screen sizes from desktops and tablets of varying sizes to phones. The admin control panel remained designed solely for full-size desktop screens. If you were in a pinch and needed to make a change in the control panel on your phone, you could, but it was far from efficient as you zoomed in and out...

Today we'll be talking about some smaller improvements that we have made in XF 1.5 which have been heavily requested. Ability to disable trophies globally The above option appears below the Trophy list in the Admin CP and in the User Options option group which makes it easy to switch off the Trophy system. When disabled, trophies will no longer be awarded, nor will the UI display anything that mentions trophy points. The "User Title Ladder Field" will automatically switch to "Messages" if trophies are disabled. No "Most Points" tab on the Notable Members page. No Trophy Points stat on the visitor panel... ...or the member card. Threads with the latest posts in the sidebar In XenForo 1.4 we introduced the "New Profile Posts"...

Today, we're continuing on with our look at some of the new features coming in the 1.1 release of the XenForo Resource Manager. Up next are 2 of the most common requests. Note that as before, we're not running RM 1.1 here yet so you can't play with these just yet. Resource Icons In the current RM release, the icon that is displayed with a resource has simply been the avatar of the author. This has been used in resource lists and next to the title when viewing the resource itself. In 1.1, administrators can choose to let users upload unique icons for each resource instead, similar to what you might find in various app stores. The icon allows resource authors to have a space to add a quick, unique identifying element to their resource...

We missed last week, but lets make it up with a look at a bunch of new things coming in 1.2. We do still have various "big" things to show, but we'll save them for another day. Template editing improvements: tabs, ctrl-s, auto tabbing The template editor in the admin CP is now easier to code directly within with a few changes: Pressing tab will now insert an actual tab. You can save the template using ctrl+s (or cmd+s). When you press enter on a line that starts with whitespace, the next line will automatically start with that amount of whitespace. (Basically, this keeps your tab depth.) If you highlight multiple lines, you can use tab or shift-tab to indent or outdent all of the selected lines automatically. <xen:set> improvements...

Here are a handful of new 1.3 features neatly packaged up into a single video for your viewing entertainment... View on Vimeo Update, Jan 15 - Case Sensitivity 101 There have been various questions about what case sensitive searching means in the video... In a nutshell, without case sensitivity, searching for 'Foo' would return all results containing any combination of uppercase and lowercase letters spelling 'foo', such as 'foo', 'fOo', 'foO' and 'Foo'. However, with case sensitivity enabled, searching for 'Foo' would only return results that contain exactly 'Foo', while other combinations of uppercase and lowercase letters would be ignored.

Compared to profile posts themselves, profile post comments have been missing tools for user interaction and moderator management. XenForo 1.5 sorts this by adding an array of new, but familiar, functionality to profile post comments. This screenshot should give you a good idea of some of the changes :) Ability to like profile post comments This is actually specifically one of the most popular suggestions and is pretty self explanatory. Profile post comments now support the like system. Of course if someone likes your comment, you get an alert just as you would expect: And we have also added support for comments appearing in the News Feed / Recent Activity: Soft deleting profile post comments Until now the only way to remove...

Route Filters are a new system in XenForo 1.2 to allow you to change the standard URLs generated by XenForo, including any URLs generated by add-ons. It's a fairly simple system to show, but it's very powerful with a little thought. Let's look at what you can set with it: Other than a list of route filters, that's really it for the system. So how about a few examples... Changing a route prefix There's an add-on that does this right now, but we can do it simply from here. For example, if you want to change the resources URL to downloads, you'd just enter resources/ in the find box and downloads/ in the replace box. Instantly, any links to http://xenforo.com/community/resources/ would become...