We continue our XenForo Resource Manager 1.1 feature showcase with 2 more commonly requested features. These may not be ground breaking, but they will significantly expand the flexibility of the Resource Manager and open up more possibilities for using it.
Resource Category Permissions
I'm not sure what to show here exactly as you can probably guess what this looks like. :)
If you are familiar with node permissions, you'll understand this straight away. In the current release of the RM, permissions can only be specified at the "global" level (user groups or per user). Individual resource categories cannot have any separate permissions, except by setting the Allow resources to be created by... option.
Now, every permission can be...
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
The XenForo 1.1 'warning' system allows board staff to handle trouble-making users in a structured and manageable way.
Update, October 15 2011:
I've made some changes and improvements...
When it comes to quickly and easily toggling the display or behaviour of user interface elements, it often makes sense to be able to pass simple parameters to the templates.
XenForo provides a powerful and extensible system to allow variables to be defined and modified on a per-style basis, making this a breeze and opening the door for style customization by third-party add-ons.
I suggest you view this video at full-size by clicking the full-screen gadget in the bottom-right of the video.
Floris has been kind enough to produce a video showing our page navigation system in action, so I will just link to his video and you can see it for yourself:
A few things to note:
When the page loads, the only page links that are in the HTML are the ones that are visible. The links that appear when you scroll the gadget are generated with Javascript, so they don't suck up resources when they are not required.
This system is most useful for navigating 50ish pages. For a greater span of pages, we will be putting in a 'jump to page' function shortly.
Edit: September 12th 2010 - You can now go nuts with these things in the PageNav Playground!
In an attempt to decrease the number of HTTP requests made (and thereby speed up pages), virtually all of XenForo 1.1's UI icon graphics come from just two sprites.
xenforo-ui-sprite.png
node-sprite.png
Attached below are the 24 bit versions of the same sprites, for those of you who wish to edit them but don't have a graphic program which supports the 8 bit versions.
XenForo 1.2 adds another commonly requested feature: the ability to watch a forum. The forum watching system works rather similarly to the thread watching system, just on all content within a forum.
When you click the link to watch a forum, you'll see an overlay like this:
Notification-less watching options may be expanded in the future (such as with indications on the new threads list).
Notifications work identically to thread watching notifications: you'll only receive one about a thread until you view it on the forum.
Like threads, you can manage your watched forums in bulk via a dedicated page. This can also be used to simply filter only to forums you're interested in.
Administrators can also limit the type of...
In the first of our spotlights on new features in 1.2, we're going to be looking at 2 user management improvements in particular. Keep an eye on this forum to see when we post more teasers. :)
Note that any features we demonstrate here are still in development, so things about them may change before they're released in a 1.2 beta.
User Merging
The first feature is rather important, though fairly simple to explain. In 1.2, you can now merge 2 users. The "source" user will have all of their content assigned to the "target" user and then the "source" user will be deleted.
It's very easy to use. From the user edit page in the admin CP, you can choose to merge:
Then it's just a matter of choosing who you want to merge into...
1.1.4 includes some additional anti-spam options for the registration form. These are small enough improvements that they can be done for a 1.1.x release. You will see some deeper integration of additional tools (such as the previously-shown StopForumSpam) in 1.2. As always, targeted attacks may potentially be able to mitigate some anti-spam techniques.
Built-in Registration Timer
A registration timer system is now built-in to the registration form. For a valid user, they simply cannot submit the form until the time is up. If a person submits the form without waiting long enough, they will need to wait again until to submit the registration.
This can be configured in the admin control panel:
Unique Registration Key
This...
Let's take a break from some of the bigger feature improvements coming in 1.2 and look at some of the smaller tweaks. This isn't necessarily an exhaustive list. I can't really remember everything. ;)
User thread title editing
A new permission has been added to control whether users can edit the titles of their own threads. This is automatically tied into the post editing length permission.
This also includes editing the prefix as well.
Style property cache size reduced
If you have a number of styles installed, you may have had to fight with MySQL max_allowed_packet due to the style property cache size. The cache will now only store changes from the default value, reducing the size of the cache per style.
Template compilation...
While many of you will have seen the Resource Manager from a user viewpoint here, you haven't seen what's available for the admin. Below are screenshots of the main options for the RM, what controls you have over a category, and the permissions available. There are some other things like cache rebuilding and moderator logging that the RM does, but they're not particularly interesting.
So, let's look at some rather big images then...
General Options
Category Controls
Permissions
One of the most requested features for XenForo 1.1 has been the ability to define custom fields for your users. Here's a first look at the user field system we've built.
Following on from the bulk user management feature we showed earlier, XenForo 1.2 will also allow you to do bulk thread management from the control panel. You will be able to search for any thread with this set of criteria:
Note that this finds threads and not posts within them.
And then you can take the following actions on matching threads:
I don't believe we showed this with bulk user management, but the same option applies there. If you're unsure if the matches are correct or if you want to manually filter them down, you can click the "view or filter matches" link. For bulk thread management, you'll get results like this:
You can use the check boxes on the left to manually filter which of the matched threads will be...
A large forum will probably get a lot of reports, so in 1.2 we've tried to streamline the reporting system and make it easier for moderators to work with. Let's see what new options there are...
Reporting to a forum
Before I start, if you're one of those people that really doesn't like the default reporting system, you can turn it off and have reports create threads in a forum. If you have a workflow around this, then you can go back to using it but obviously you'll need to setup things like prefixes or workflows to define how to mark "closed" reports, etc.
If you choose this option, none of the changes that I'm listing below apply to you, so you can just ignore the rest of this message if you want. ;)
Updated reports counter
The...
