'All New Content' tab on find-new (new posts)

[Alpha1]

Currently new content can be found in tabs on find new. Each content type has a tab. Some addons have multiple content types. If you have a lot of addons you can easily have 15+ tabs that need to be clicked to discover all new content.

This of course is not intuitive nor effective.

Please add a 'New Content' tab that displays all items that have new content.
This way users could just browse one stream of new content, without the need to click on a mass of tabs.

I think its very important that such new content stream would have a neat orderly layout, as the diversity of content and its sizes can make the layout chaotic and confusing.

 

[Joeychgo]

I think this is important and should be implemented asap

 

[Triops]

There is an implementation currently ongoing for xf1.5

 

[AddonsLab]

Hello everyone!

Just to confirm, that we have released our version of this add-on that can be found at https://xenforo.com/community/resources/whats-new-page-by-addonslab.5933/ Please check out and let us know your thoughts in the thread there.

Thank you!

 

[Alpha1]

That's actually something different than this suggestion. This suggestion asks for one page/tab (not a tabbed solution of many tabs) that displays unread content in an orderly manner.

 

[AddonsLab]

That's actually something different than this suggestion. This suggestion asks for one page/tab (not a tabbed solution of many tabs) that displays unread content in an orderly manner.

This is a one page, but it follows XenForo interface adding the tabs to other contents on the same page. The tabs themselves are not provided by the product, but from XenForo and add-ons. The tabs are regular links and not handled by the product in anyway. The landing page, however, show the content from all tabs at once, under each other. I think this is the expect result by serveral users in this thread, and is based on original suggestion of @Triops at https://xenforo.com/community/threads/all-new-content-tab-on-find-new-new-posts.119772/#post-1154115 who partially funded the development.

As you mentioned in your post, the layout of such page is a big issue due to difference of content types and the way they render (the most obvious example being gallery items that have to be shown as thumbnails, but most of other content is textual), so we took the approach of having separate sectors for each content type, and each sector show the first page of that content and has a View More button to navigate to the second page of the same content. The content is shown exactly as it is shown under the appropriate tab, which made it possible to have our add-on not to have any third-party specific code, and virtually support any add-on, that properly adds a tab in "New content" pages.

The page is also not server-intensive, as additional content loads only when user scrolls down the page and sees more content types. It also solves the problem you have highlighted, about users simply not clicking on any tabs and viewing only the landing page (which is in XenForo 1.x only new posts). With progressive load user will keep seeing new content on the same page.

As I understand, in case of too many add-ons installed, you would actually consider having a page, that does not have any tabs in it, but directly shows the new content. We could enhance the product with an option to have it like that. Also, we could make the "View More" button to actually load the content right in the page instead of navigating to the built in page to show the second page.

Please let me know your thoughts and suggestions.

Thank you!

 

[AddonsLab]

@Alfa1 Please also have a look on demo page to see how it works with built-in tabs - https://addonslab.com/find-new/overview

Thank you!

 

[Alpha1]

The purpose of this suggestion is to have one (paginated) page that displays all new unread content. Basically the same concept as new-posts but then for all new unread content. Your addon takes a similar approach as XF2 which IMHO is not useful. If you have a lot of addons then members still need to jump to the dozens of tabs to look if there is more content or not. And when they are there it is likely that they continue to browse in that one tab without returning to the rest of the new content, forgetting whatever other content there may also be. This issue becomes more complex when there is more content.

People need to be able to start browsing at the top of the page and continue down in a singular manner, without having to divert from the action to reach all the different content types. Displaying a few items per content type does not offer much benefit IMHO.

As I understand, in case of too many add-ons installed, you would actually consider having a page, that does not have any tabs in it, but directly shows the new content. We could enhance the product with an option to have it like that.

That is correct and this would be nice. I appreciate that.

What I currently use is a combination of the Live Feed addon an a lot of modifications to the newsfeed to hide irrelevant events and elements. The things that I changed made the various content types display in an orderly manner and each row be formatted the same way and height. For example media and attachments thumbs are displayed smaller and the same size. The downside of this approach of using the newsfeed is that it also displays read content and it also is not available to guests (cant see profiles)

It would be great it the would be a page similar to this (as in orderly and just one page that displays all new unread content in chronological order regardless of content type. Available to guests and members. If possible with autoload like the Live Feed addon has. (this really enhances the experience)

 

[Joeychgo]

This is a one page, but it follows XenForo interface adding the tabs to other contents on the same page. The tabs themselves are not provided by the product, but from XenForo and add-ons. The tabs are regular links and not handled by the product in anyway. The landing page, however, show the content from all tabs at once, under each other. I think this is the expect result by serveral users in this thread, and is based on original suggestion of @Triops at https://xenforo.com/community/threads/all-new-content-tab-on-find-new-new-posts.119772/#post-1154115 who partially funded the development.

As you mentioned in your post, the layout of such page is a big issue due to difference of content types and the way they render (the most obvious example being gallery items that have to be shown as thumbnails, but most of other content is textual), so we took the approach of having separate sectors for each content type, and each sector show the first page of that content and has a View More button to navigate to the second page of the same content. The content is shown exactly as it is shown under the appropriate tab, which made it possible to have our add-on not to have any third-party specific code, and virtually support any add-on, that properly adds a tab in "New content" pages.

The page is also not server-intensive, as additional content loads only when user scrolls down the page and sees more content types. It also solves the problem you have highlighted, about users simply not clicking on any tabs and viewing only the landing page (which is in XenForo 1.x only new posts). With progressive load user will keep seeing new content on the same page.

As I understand, in case of too many add-ons installed, you would actually consider having a page, that does not have any tabs in it, but directly shows the new content. We could enhance the product with an option to have it like that. Also, we could make the "View More" button to actually load the content right in the page instead of navigating to the built in page to show the second page.

Please let me know your thoughts and suggestions.

Thank you!

The key for me is to be able to get things like Bob's Blog and Articles addon included in the New Posts link.

 

[AddonsLab]

The purpose of this suggestion is to have one (paginated) page that displays all new unread content. Basically the same concept as new-posts but then for all new unread content. Your addon takes a similar approach as XF2 which IMHO is not useful. If you have a lot of addons then members still need to jump to the dozens of tabs to look if there is more content or not. And when they are there it is likely that they continue to browse in that one tab without returning to the rest of the new content, forgetting whatever other content there may also be. This issue becomes more complex when there is more content.

People need to be able to start browsing at the top of the page and continue down in a singular manner, without having to divert from the action to reach all the different content types. Displaying a few items per content type does not offer much benefit IMHO.

That is correct and this would be nice. I appreciate that.

What I currently use is a combination of the Live Feed addon an a lot of modifications to the newsfeed to hide irrelevant events and elements. The things that I changed made the various content types display in an orderly manner and each row be formatted the same way and height. For example media and attachments thumbs are displayed smaller and the same size. The downside of this approach of using the newsfeed is that it also displays read content and it also is not available to guests (cant see profiles)

It would be great it the would be a page similar to this (as in orderly and just one page that displays all new unread content in chronological order regardless of content type. Available to guests and members. If possible with autoload like the Live Feed addon has. (this really enhances the experience)

Thank you for the detailed reply.

Paginated results of all new content is out of the scope of this add-on, and there is an important reason why we decided not to implement such add-on. As you know, XenForo has search index, where all content from all add-ons is indexed. This index is used to display the content when users search something using search forms. The results are shown as a single list, showing content from all content types. So, it should be possible to use this index to build a page of "new" content. Unfortunately, XenForo "standard" way of new content pages is implementation of separate queries, that return the data. So, XenForo itself does not use the index for new posts and new profile posts, but does content-specific query to get this content. I can understand the reason behind this being too many content-specific toggles that affect the behavior of new content page (e.g. marking forum/thread as read changes the list of new posts for the current user, and it does not for someone else, and is completely irrelevant when it comes to fetching new profile posts).The add-ons followed this lead and implemented their own methods that decide what content should be shown under new media, new articles etc.

So, if we would use the search index (the only way to show mixed results), we would have to re-implement the logic of fetching the content for each and every case, for each and every add-on. This might be simply impossible to achieve (at least not without doing too many queries), and even if we would implement it, we would have to write add-on specific code for many add-ons, and any mistakes in doing so, or changes in the way the add-on itself works would cause large amount of support requests for our add-on, as users would expect to see exactly the same content on our page and on add-ons "new" page (e.g. if there is an article shown on our page, and it not shown on New Articles page, it is a bug in our add-on and we should fix it). So, we do not expect sales of such add-on to be anywhere close to compensate the efforts of creating such solution.

The key for me is to be able to get things like Bob's Blog and Articles addon included in the New Posts link.

This add-on does not do it, unfortunately. It is only a new/separate page with the content of the tabs being shown under each other and loaded via AJAX.

Thank you!

 

[rhodes]

This way users could just browse one stream of new content, without the need to click on a mass of tabs.
I think its very important that such new content stream would have a neat orderly layout, as the diversity of content and its sizes can make the layout chaotic and confusing.

I agree that it is too confusing for users to search for new content or activities in four or more tabs. They don't do it, that's my experience.

According to Google Analytics in our forum "find-new" is the most visited page. It is displayed a hundred times as often as page "news-feed" or "account/news-feed", for example. This means most users do not find these informations.

Any idea how a solution for xf1.5 could look like?

 

[Joe Link]

@Alpha1

I know this was a long time ago, but did you ever find anything like this? Basically I want to create another page just like New Posts but with additional content types.

 

[Alpha1]

No, I did not find anything like this. It is something that I need to have once I upgrade my big board to XF2.

 

[beerForo]

Hoping 2.3 addresses this. It's the reason I had to stop using Gallery and made my video section a forum node.