Welcome to XenForo 2

Today, we have taken a major step forward in the move to make XenForo 2 our primary, stable and supported platform. While we have run a XenForo 2 demo since November, the main community site has remained on XenForo 1.x during development. After ten public developer previews, we now consider XF2 to be ready for further duties, and therefore we have upgraded our own forums.

XenForo 2 represents a significant technological advancement over XenForo 1. The entire software architecture has been rewritten for enhanced efficiency, stability and speed of development. Systems such as XF2's entities provide for easy, rapid, error-proof fetching and manipulation of data, allowing new features and add-ons to be developed with hitherto unseen speed and reliability (1), (2).

User-facing features have now gone beyond parity with XenForo 1, and new enhancements such as Quick Thread and Thread Prompts, the What's New system and enhanced media embedding, along with many other changes, offer end-users new opportunities for engagement, interaction and discovery.

XenForo 2.0.0 Developer Preview 10 remains available to download, and will continue to be available until the next release, which we expect to be our first public beta. Upgrading XenForo.com to XF2 has been a major test of the upgrade system, and so the forthcoming beta will be customers' first opportunity to experiment with test upgrades of their own forum installations (the upgrade system is unavailable in Developer Preview releases).

For now, please continue to offer feedback and suggestions in the usual manner. We have opened a collection of new forums specifically for XenForo 2 bug reports etc., and we will be adding new thread prefixes that you can use to identify your threads as XF2-related.

Please note that although XenForo 2 is essentially feature-locked, in order that we can progress as quickly as possible through beta testing and on to a stable, supported release, we are of course actively soliciting suggestions and feedback for XenForo 2.1 and beyond, for which we already have big plans - we are very excited to continue building new and exciting features on the new framework, and we are greatly looking forward to seeing what the add-on community comes up with.

 

[Kier]

Just a few changes to note since Developer Preview 10:

There is now a single page for finding new posts, namely whats-new/posts - the forums/new-posts system is now used only when 'new posts' is set as the forums home page, and links to that page will redirect to whats-new/posts.

The breadcrumb system has been updated to prevent the current page being included in the breadcrumb list. This primarily assists mobile users, who see only the last breadcrumb and use it to step back up the navigation tree. We have also created an option that enables the root breadcrumb to be controlled.

Thread prompts now have grouping capabilities:

Sticky message elements have been disabled pending further development.

Pop-up menus have had an overhaul of their positioning system, and will now pop up above their trigger if there is insufficient space to fit in their default position below the trigger.

The keyboard shortcut system has been rewritten to better support international keyboard layouts.

This is not an exhaustive list...