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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Articles are definitely something I will use. Xenporta sort of lets you do them but someone has to promote a thread to an article to enable it and I didn't want to trust all my users with that ability nor did I think our moderation team would want to be doing it all the time.
 
this is a great improvement!

Question:
is it possible to display a certain number of "articles" directly at the "Homepage" ? Without the need for the user to first dive into a "Forum" ?

I have it working fine already with XF 1.x at my website www.exportclub.com
I am wondering if XF 2.x can achieve some sort of "Link Directory" in combination with these new "article forums".
 
Articles are definitely something I will use.
I'm excited to use them in combo with thread custom fields. Perfect for niche sites and articles on makes, models, sizes, etc.

EDIT: Oh man I hope the fields can be applied to content types of a forum node only.
 
I like the idea. If it showed the full article and you selected 5 max it could make a nice "bloggy" home page.
you can alreday do that 👇
Article forums

While there's nothing stopping you listing your articles ordered by the date of their last comment, article forums can be set up to have a very different look from a traditional forum.

Screenshot 2020-06-17 at 15.54.12 article forum.png
Ideal for site news or a blog, using the additional navigation options, you can easily set this up to display as the "home" part of your site or in another navigation section entirely.
just set an article node as homepage

Articles are definitely something I will use. Xenporta sort of lets you do them but someone has to promote a thread to an article to enable it and I didn't want to trust all my users with that ability nor did I think our moderation team would want to be doing it all the time.
how about put article in moderation or in a node that only the author can see it and then move it to the "home page" node?
 
You would use the node in Discussion mode for that. If you still wanted Polls like before they would be a tab. That's the only difference to the classic mode besides the other new content types.
 
I don't know if this has been asked or answered, but if polls were moved to a new tab, is more than one question now supported?
 
Not quite sure I’m following.

Why would moving polls to a tab indicate that we now support multiple questions?

What are the significant problems with having a tab - which is now displayed more more prominently - to enable the poll controls?
 
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