XF 2.2 Forum and thread types

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Forums contain threads and threads contain posts. It's been the essential framework of forums on the Internet since the public migrated from usenet to the web.

The structure is well known and well understood - though the origins of some of the terminology are lost in the mists of time. Who ever came up with the notion of your site being a forum, but these separate containers for related threads also being forums? 🤷🏼‍♂️

But back on topic, and we all know that visiting a forum (the second type) will usually show a list of threads ordered with the most recently updated near the top, and that clicking on any of those threads will show a page with the oldest post first and newer posts underneath and on subsequent pages.

Bending discussion forums to varying purposes

Over the years, forum administrators have been inventive and used the simple messages-in-named-containers structure of forums to build all sorts of content - let's look at the XenForo community as an example.

First, we have announcements and these "Have you seen" threads. These are quite focused on the initial post (or first few posts in some HYS threads), with these posts containing a lot of information... a bit like an article with subsequent comments.

Then we have the suggestions forums, where we ask people to up-vote the ideas they're interested in.

There are also support forums where people are looking for answers to questions or solutions to problems.

And of course there are also forums for general chat and discussions, which most closely fit the original notion of a discussion thread and where you can't really say the threads fit the same model as the other types.

Up until now, these forums and the threads within have all been displayed the same way.

But not any more

With XenForo 2.2, we are introducing the concept of Forum and thread types. This is a massive change with enormous ramifications for forums. Today, we're only really going to talk about the admin and user experience of the new systems, but in a few days we're going to follow up with a developer-focused HYS where we will talk about what's going on behind the scenes here, because we're really rather excited about the potential it unlocks.

There is a lot to talk about, but let's just dive into some examples...

tl;dr

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A Grand Slam! The Royal Rumble! Mind Blowing! Frigging Awesomeness!! You guys are pretty much implementing everything that was there to be implemented. It's like the slog overs! Is it really xF 2.2.x or xF 3.x.x!!
 
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You know, I agree that it's a pretty hefty for a second point level increase, but haven't seen any really fundamental changes like we had going from 1.x to 2.x 9 (where add-ons and styles had to be redone) so I don't think we are at a first point level increase yet. The last two HYS have definitely got my attention, though. The first few were, to be honest, a bit ho-hum for my forum though I'll use some of them at some point. But thread types will definitely get used fairly early on once I upgrade.
 
Do we have first-post (or content type) specific permissions available? For example - in article threads we really need to be able to allow the author longer time to edit the article compared to what other users can do in their replies (on the assumption that the author is just a regular user and not in a special permission group)
 
Do we have first-post (or content type) specific permissions available? For example - in article threads we really need to be able to allow the author longer time to edit the article compared to what other users can do in their replies (on the assumption that the author is just a regular user and not in a special permission group)
 
I'm excited for these features, too, and also curious about the new permissions associated with them.
For instance, in question threads would it be possible to only allow staff to select the correct answer?
 
You know, I agree that it's a pretty hefty for a second point level increase, but haven't seen any really fundamental changes like we had going from 1.x to 2.x
There won't be another first point release (XF 3) for quite some time.
3.0 would be a complete rewrite of the backend, like what happened from XF1 to XF2. And as @Brogan says, I wouldn't expect it for quite a while either. I remember reading that the developers had hit the wall in terms of how they could extend XF1, hence the ground-up development of XF2. If these last two HYS threads are any indication, they are a long way from exhausting the possibilities of XF2.
 
This new feature is really really great. I'm using an add-on that does the question forum now which is good. But this is much better.
 
q? Would it be possible to pull RSS feeds from JUST the Article-type threads to populate another page ie: Wordpress? Or perhaps to populate the Activity Summary Email?
 
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If the forums will no longer be forums exclusively in the traditional sense might we get the option to remove 'forums' from the URL and/or alter it for a certain type of forum?

Edit: I know I can use Route Filters but I mean the setting as per type of forum.
 
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