XF 2.2 Article thread and forum updates and improvements

article previews.jpg
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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​

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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 that can be found below the article body.

Behind the scenes, we've also added schema.org metadata markup to help identify this content as an article and associated author, which will be more highly regarded as quality content by search engines than a standard forum thread.

Screenshot 2020-07-31 at 12.28.12.png


New listing layouts​

For 2.2.0 beta 1, article forums can list their contents either in standard thread listing format, or the new 'expanded' view.

Screenshot 2020-07-31 at 11.37.39.png Screenshot 2020-07-31 at 11.37.28.png

With 2.2.0 beta 2, these options have had a re-think.

Screenshot 2020-07-31 at 13.02.24.png


We have renamed the 'Full' option, which shows a standard thread listing to Standard. (We have also renamed any other instances where a thread listing is shown from full to standard, you'll find this mostly in widget options)

Expanded view​

Screenshot 2020-07-31 at 12.42.37.png
The existing Expanded option has been revised, and now pulls a modified version of the full article first-post template that removes the footer controls and adds the article title.

If you set the snippet length option here to 0, the entire first post (the article) will be rendered in the list, such that multiple full articles are visible on the listing page, much as you would expect to find on a blog.

Of course, you can choose a snippet length if your articles tend to be very long, or if you want people to view articles on their own canonical page along with their comments.

Preview​

Screenshot 2020-07-31 at 12.54.25.png
Preview is our new, third display option for article listings.

It displays article blocks in a responsive grid, with the first article on the page occupying the full width of the page, the next few being half-width and the subsequent blocks occupying a quarter width. The grid is entirely CSS driven, and I'm sure we'll see all manner of different layouts in use with custom CSS before too long.

Preview mode is intended to be used with a snippet of the article text, and includes the ability to show a cover image, which currently fetches the first embedded image from the article, whether that be hot linked with an [IMG] tag, or directly attached. If no image can be found, the layout will gracefully omit the cover image.

The most important info about the article is all here, including the author's name and avatar, a link to the comments and indicators to show unread comments.

Inline moderation works in all article listings now.

Screenshot 2020-07-31 at 13.01.01.png

Similar schema.org metadata markup to that in full and expanded articles is also present in previews.

It's worth noting that the cover image only has to be the first embed in the article in order to be used as a cover, but it does not necessarily have to be visible. A sneaky trick to get a cover image that is separate from the content of the article is to set its width and height to 0, rendering it invisible in the actual article body.

Screenshot 2020-07-31 at 12.52.40.png

Conclusion​

Article threads and forums are an important part of the feature set for XenForo 2.2, and one that we intend to continue to develop as time goes on. This is probably as far as we'll go for 2.2, but we hope that you'll be happy with what we've done so far.

I should also add some credit to The Brothers Brick, whose excellent RSS feed populates my article test data - Kier
 
I had an issue in one of my forums where I wanted to use Articles, but did not want to splinter articles off into their own forum, as we have our forums arranged by topics and I would rather keep them grouped that way.

My solution for that was another newer XenForo feature--a Search Forum. What I did was set up a search forum that allowed the Article thread type, and it pulled all of those into one tidy area that I used for feature articles and news. It's not quite ideal (members get confused that they're dumped into the originating forum vs. ending up back in the search forum), but it's a good way to highlight content.

Ideally I wanted to find a way to have that search forum be our entire site's home page, but for now this will do.
Please vote on this suggestion, then: https://xenforo.com/community/threa...e-type-threads-preview-e-g-for-portal.184876/
 
This looks really good, but is there a way to allow text to wrap around images like you can in Wordpress? As it is the formatting looks off when using images.
 
That's brilliant, in the few examples I've seen they've not been aligned. Perhaps people are just not using the feature properly.
It is very similar (if not the same) as the way it's done in the WordPress editor. Only, the menu for the attachment is not something that appears until you click on the attachment after inserting it. That is why it's somewhat overlooked, but makes sense once you learn the trick.

I also like that the menu lets you resize images to exact dimensions, and you can enter something like 300 px for width with height to "auto," and that will adjust the size while keeping the same aspect ratio.
 
It is very similar (if not the same) as the way it's done in the WordPress editor. Only, the menu for the attachment is not something that appears until you click on the attachment after inserting it. That is why it's somewhat overlooked, but makes sense once you learn the trick.

I also like that the menu lets you resize images to exact dimensions, and you can enter something like 300 px for width with height to "auto," and that will adjust the size while keeping the same aspect ratio.
Thanks, is there a way to have articles listed on a front page? Currently I'm using Xenporta but would rather it be running entirely on Xenforo if possible.
 
You can.
Create a forum page, put the right widgets on it, set the page as home page.
But the render will not be as Bob AMS add-on can do.
I think it's difficult for me.. I don't have much experience with XF, how would I recall the style ? widgets and the rest ? (thanks for your help)
 
That's not the good thread for that, open yours to discuss about what you want to do with your forum.
 
That's not the good thread for that, open yours to discuss about what you want to do with your forum.
I can't talk there, I have to buy a license
 
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