Automatic feature expiry
When curating content, sometimes it can take time to manage the list of featured content effectively to ensure it stays fresh for your visitors, and part of that is the inevitable time where perhaps content is no longer noteworthy and needs to be "unfeatured". You can, of course, do this manually but, now, you don't have to.For new and existing features in the "Customize" section you can now select "Unfeature after..." and specify the number of days the content should be featured for.
Don't want to specify this manually? No problem. We now have a dedicated option group in the admin control panel:
Within you will find, amongst other options, the default feature length, allowing you to set it once and all newly featured content will be automatically unfeatured after this number of days.
More global controls, view permission and new advertising positions
As you can see above, you can also now control the number of "Features per page" on the featured content list, along with the character limit of the feature snippets.We have also added a new permission to control which users can view the featured content list.
Finally, we have added the following advertising positions:
- Featured content: Above feature list
- Featured content: Below feature
- Featured content: Below feature list
Widget context children
You can already use widgets to display contextual content which allows a widget to display content from the current forum where it is displayed but we have now extended this so you can also show featured content from its child forums too.Cleaner widget view
For widgets that are able to display mixed-content lists, to distinguish between different types of content we prefix the title with the type of content it is. While this generally makes sense, it makes much less sense when the featured threads (or trending content) widget is filtered to show only a specific content type. In those cases we now no longer display the content type prefix:
Activity summary support
It's a shame for the people who don't visit your site regularly to miss out on your curated content, so we've added a new "Latest featured content" section that you can configure and add to your activity summary emails.Full REST API support
If you want to manage featured content via the built-in REST API including creating, viewing, updating and deleting featured content then we've added all of the necessary endpoints to do so.Featured content list improvements
We've also added other improvements to the display of featured content lists including the carousel view which now shows a small version of the featured image rather than the author's avatar:
On the featured content list itself, we've added a member filter so you can see all featured content by a specified user:
If you got this far, we hope you found something useful here to enhance your content curation efforts. We'll be back soon with more goodies for XenForo 2.4.
