XF 2.4 Featured content improvements

Since announcing Featured Content for XenForo 2.3 we have been closely monitoring feedback through various channels and our own overall vision for the feature and, as such, in today's Have you seen...? for XenForo 2.4 we are highlighting some of the recent changes we have made.

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.

 

[FTL]

Ah, shame. Will that feature be coming at some point?

 

[Alpha1]

People understand what a thread is. Anyway, the point is it’s not just noise, it’s there to resolve ambiguity. I think it may be fair to say it doesn’t need to be as prominent (ie. part of the title), but it’s unlikely to be removed entirely.

I would not assume that everyone understands what a thread is but that asides. How many average internet users understand what a resource is. The word itself is ambiguous.
It's easy to remove with a template modification, so it doesn't matter much. In my experience it's easy to assume that others understand the same things that are obvious to us. But time and time again forum users prove that we should not assume that.

 

[Jeremy P]

Edit: Hope this is for the trending widget too.

It is.

Auto-featuring and node filtering would make it much more useful.

There is already basic auto-featuring, but frankly our vision is that featured content is more for manual curation, and that algorithmic curation will be better served by the trending system in the long term.

Does it (or can it) extend to the widget view?

Not on the simple display style, since we only save the feature image in a single size (much too large to be practical for display that small). We could save it in different sizes of course, like we do with avatars, but the story is complicated by the fact that feature images can be and often are pulled automatically from content instead of being set manually.

Will there be an option to use an image from the thread as the cover image for feature content, instead of just a small icon?

We already do this for the full view and widget article display style, but this will now extend to the carousel display style as well.

In my experience it's easy to assume that others understand the same things that are obvious to us. But time and time again forum users prove that we should not assume that.

I don't necessarily disagree, but we already provide the tools to rename pretty much anything you want, including UI phrases and routes if you feel there's another word that your users will have an easier time understanding or learning.

 

[TickTackk]

Ah, shame. Will that feature be coming at some point?

After someone releases it as an add-on, yes.

/s

 

[Mouth]

There is already basic auto-featuring, but frankly our vision is that featured content is more for manual curation, and that algorithmic curation will be better served by the trending system in the long term.

We very much see this as a precursor to grander improvements to content discovery in general in the future, focusing around helping users find the content that matters; the content that is currently "hot" or otherwise popular.

Hopefully algorithmic automatic content featuring is still to come for 2.4? Still waiting for a reason to upgrade beyond 2.2.

In the meantime, we have to contend with addon developers removing existing automatic functionality to be able to integrate XF's featured content functionality

 

[Jeremy P]

As I said in your quote, we don’t really view featured content as an avenue for algorithmic selection at all. Chris’s quote is about the trending content system, which we do plan to build further on over time in similar ways.

 

[Alpha1]

Automatic featuring has always been a popular feature for add-ons.

 

[Jeremy P]

Yes, especially in the absence of a better system for surfacing content people are engaging with. Fortunately, we have a new, different system to build on which is purpose-built for exactly that.

 

[Alpha1]

Trending content has been similarly popular for 10 years now. First release here. But it's really nice that Trending content is in the core now.
The difference between featured and trending is that featured is relevant for longer as it often relates to high quality content, whereas trending is popular recent content..

 

[Jeremy P]

As stated previously, our current outlook is roughly that manual curation and algorithmic feeds serve distinct purposes. Existing add-ons may have blurred the lines between the two to try to meet dual needs for their respective customers. We'll continue building out these separate systems, and as they both evolve we'll continue to listen to the feedback we get and adjust accordingly.

 

[Mouth]

Automatic featuring has always been a popular feature for add-ons.

our current outlook is roughly that manual curation and algorithmic feeds serve distinct purposes.

I'm hoping the popularity of addons providing criteria based automatic content featuring is recognition of feedback and desire.
As was said, trending feeds and content curation serve distinct purposes. Criteria based automated content featuring is not a trending feed but is very much content curation. It's about surfacing high value content to users, not just whatever is currently being engaged or trended this day/week. Much the same as criteria based automated feature expiry is content curation and not trending feed.

 

[Jeremy P]

Our ambitions for the trending system stretch beyond whatever is currently being engaged with this day or week. Criteria-based features feel very much like a poor man's trending feed to me personally, but if we continue to hear otherwise in the presence of a proper one we can always reconsider.

 

[Suzanne O]

I reckon this is going to be awesome.
Kind of what we need.
Those of us on the cloud have featured content up and it will be great with the much needed changes that are about to hop on our forums

 

[Forsaken]

Our ambitions for the trending system stretch beyond whatever is currently being engaged with this day or week. Criteria-based features feel very much like a poor man's trending feed to me personally, but if we continue to hear otherwise in the presence of a proper one we can always reconsider.

You are already hearing otherwise, and you have been pushing back against customers who have replied about specific use cases or workflows that rely on the features.

If you need more than a few customers sharing their opinion you need to proactively do more to find out how customers use the existing features, rather than going in with a bias that your vision for trending content can replace how people currently do things.

And at the end of the day, if your ambitions with trending do come to past then the most it really cost was some development time to hold people over with what they already use in their current workflows .

 

[Jeremy P]

And at the end of the day, if your ambitions with trending do come to past then the most it really cost was some development time to hold people over with what they already use in their current workflows .

We're a small team which must prioritize pretty aggressively, and we're constantly asked (not wrongfully so, of course) for faster releases and more clarity on what we do and don't have planned for the future and why. This thread is announcing changes we're making based on popular suggestions and complaints, in a release we will deliver much sooner than the last one. I initially sought to provide some clarity into our thoughts and decisions around automatic features as it stands today. I apologize if I was too combative.

For reference, the first use case in the pertinent suggestion should be covered by a combination of the automatic functionality we already have and what we've just announced here. The second use case, in earnest, seems to be covered by the existing trending content functionality. If people have use cases or workflows that aren't covered, or just want to weigh in on the subject, feel free to let us know in that thread or a separate suggestion as warranted and we will take them into consideration.

 

[cwe]

Good enhancements overall, but the change for the images/thumbnails to be content related and not the author's avatar tops the list as far as I'm concerned. Excellent!

 

[ŽivaAkcija]

just keep going, xenforo are best forum script!

 

[VBX Co]

Can you exclude selected forums?

 

[koraldon]

Will there be an option to use an image from the thread as the cover image for feature content, instead of just a small icon?
I'm currently using the featured thread slider add-on and it offers the following style:
View attachment 319549
Which I find much more attractive than a lot of text with a small image.

Hi,
Any chance an improvement like the above (image carousal) will be implemented in 2.4?