XF 2.0 What's new in XenForo 2.0

Much of this information will be familiar to those who were following the development process over at the XF2 Demo Forums, but this is something of a ‘greatest hits’ list of some of the important changes and improvements to XenForo since the 1.x generation.

Greatly-enhanced mobile-friendly style

The new XenForo 2 style is the first thing you will notice in XF2. The entire style has been redesigned with a fresh new appearance, but also with mobile browsing at the forefront of the design. When the viewport shrinks, on-page content shrinks, shifts and reorganises itself automatically to optimise the browsing experience for small displays.

A sticky header automatically activates when the window is scrolled, allowing the most important navigation controls to remain available at all times.

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Emoji support* 👏 ✍️

All textual content in XenForo 2 now supports emoji, from message text to forum titles.

Retina avatar and smilie support

Avatars and smilies now support high-DPI imagery, allowing for a crisp, high resolution display to match the text on displays that support 2x resolution graphics, such as Apple's retina displays.

Navigation manager

Both the public-facing systems and the admin control panel now have completely customizable navigation systems, allowing the content of the navigation bars and side-navigation blocks to be entirely controlled by the site administrator without any need to resort to template modification.

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Widgets

Widgets are small blocks of content that can perform a variety of tasks, such as displaying a list of members online, or latest posts etc. Widgets can be placed into various pages within the public-facing side of XenForo using a simple interface, allowing you to build rich content-discovery systems into almost any area of the public forums.

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Enhanced message editing

Rather than opening an overlay, editing messages is now done entirely in-place, with the content of messages replaced by a full-fledged message editor that allows the complete range of editing and posting actions, including attachment management.

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Alerts in favicon

When new alerts or unread conversation messages are available, the site icon (shown in the browser title bar) will have a badge added to it, showing that there are items waiting to be viewed.

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Custom thread fields
An extension of the custom user field system, threads can now have their own custom fields, with all the functionality previously available for user fields. Thread fields can be displayed before or after message content, and can be made editable and optionally required before a thread is posted.

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Member tooltip

XF1's member card has been replaced with a new member tooltip, which appears on the first click on a member's name. A further click will load the member's full profile page.

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CSS transitions replace Javascript animations

Leveraging modern browser capabilities, almost all of the animations seen in XF2 make use of CSS transitions rather than Javascript animations, resulting in smoother, less processor-intensive transitions between states.

Customisable member stats

The old member list page has now been replaced by an all-new, customizable member statistics system. Individual statistics (such as members with the most posts, most recently-registered members etc.) can be built using an interface in the admin control panel, and are then displayed as an expandable block on the members page.

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Generic payment framework

XenForo 2 has a new payment system that is open for development, meaning that add-on developers can quickly and easily build payment gateways for providers that are not part of the core system. Using this system, XF2 ships with a number of ready-made payment options that are easy to integrate with various system enhancements that administrators may define.

Attachments shown in previews

Content previews, such as those seen when hovering a thread title on the thread list page, now include attachments for a more complete and integrated preview experience.

Enhanced code block syntax highlighting

The [CODE] block system has been greatly enhanced to display syntax highlighting for a much wider range of programming and scripting languages through the use of [CODE=language] tags.

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What’s New and Find Threads

To aid in content discovery, XF2 includes a brand new 'What's new' system, which can fetch new content from all sources across the system, including threads and posts, profile posts, media items and resources. The architecture of the system is fully extensible, so add-on developers can hook into What's new in order to add their own content types to the results.

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Additionally, a new Find threads system provides quick links to unanswered threads (with no replies), threads you have started, and threads in which you have posted.

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New media embedding features

The BB Code Media system has been significantly enhanced, and now supports embedding Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram photos, Reddit posts and comments, Spotify and Soundcloud tracks, albums and playlists and a whole host of others.

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The integration of oEmbed support allows almost any media to be embedded simply by pasting a link to the media within a message.

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Quick thread

Quick Thread is a brand new system for XF2. Above the list of threads on a forum page you will find a title entry box. Focusing this box and starting to type a thread title will load a quick message editor, in which you can post the content for the first post of your new thread. Hitting the save button will then post the thread, leaving you on the forum page rather than redirecting you to the thread page. This makes the process of creating a new simple thread extremely quick and easy.

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Thread prompts

In conjunction with Quick thread, Thread prompts allow the title input box to display a configurable prompt, giving members a hint as to what kind of content they should be posting in any given forum. Multiple prompts may be defined and assigned to forums, and an applicable prompt will be selected at random to be displayed to the user when the page loads.

Keyboard shortcut system and enhanced keyboard navigation

XenForo 2 includes an easy method to assign keyboard shortcuts to commonly-used controls, such as searching and opening the alerts list. These shortcuts are defined with simple template edits, and allow for very rapid navigation with a keyboard.

Additionally, the system can determine whether the user is currently using touch, mouse or keyboard navigation at any given time, and will highlight the currently-selected link or control appropriately when keyboard navigation is enabled, while hiding the selection when using touch or mouse methods.

New custom field options

Custom fields have had an overhaul for XF2, and now include a star-rating type, along with various validation options including dates and numbers. These enhancements apply to all custom field types, including user fields and thread fields, and are automatically available for any custom field types defined by add-ons.

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HTML 5 input types

To make data input on mobile devices more friendly, we make more extensive use of HTML 5 input types, allowing specialised keyboards to be displayed in place of the standard character keyboard. For example, when an input requires only a number, a telephone-style keyboard is displayed.

Developer / designer mode

While XF1's WebDAV system has been retired, XF2 has a whole new range of enhancements for rapid style development, including a system whereby templates can be edited directly in the file system using any editor of your choice. In designer mode, when the system detects a modified template, it will be compiled ready for the next page view that requires that template.

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CLI tools

For add-on developers and large board administrators, XF2 now includes a comprehensive suite of command line tools, allowing operations such as upgrades and add-on manipulation to be done from the terminal rather than having to operate through a web interface. This can be of huge benefit for long operations, such as recompiling all templates or upgrading a large site.

* Note that while emoji support is enabled by default on new installations, sites that have been upgraded from XenForo 1.x will require a script to be run in order to convert all text to a new emoji-supporting character set (utf8mb4). This can be a relatively long process, and administrators should perform test-runs to determine how long the process will take for their final upgrade.
 
People know how to make suggestions for the software and show their support for existing suggestions. The suggestions forum has been around for so long now, and has so many threads, that we really do feel it is indicative of the general consensus within the customer base. We also monitor other things, of course, such as random conversations which appear around the forum, or duplicate suggestions and feedback to come to us in other ways.

Clearly, if there's as many as 170 likes for a feature such as push notifications (first suggested only 5 years ago), but nearly 10 times fewer for something like newsletter functionality, it kind of speaks volumes.

Sorry that's not what you want to hear, but it's quite clear that "70-80%" isn't accurate. Obviously we keep a close eye on Suggestions in general and if there comes a time where there's a higher perceived demand for such a feature, it will be considered, but for now it is fairly low down on the list of priorities.

This isn't the thread to continue such a discussion so let's leave it at that, for now.
 
You say they don't realise it's important but want to poll them to see how important they consider it to be? That doesn't really make sense...

If it was seen as a real need, it'd be the #1 suggestion on here. I agree that polling requirements by looking at the suggestion forum is a poor methodology but if you said "XF have resources to spend a fixed number of man-hours on developing an official addon, which should it be?" then I'm confident "newsletter" wouldn't win.
 
Come on! What kind of argumentation is that?

Maybe you should send out an email to all members and make a poll. If you can inform us about new software updates, you can also raise a poll for this feature and inform everybody about it by email. Not hidden in a corner ;)

But to argument, that there is no significant interest in a newsletter feature by showing an almost hidden old thread is ridiculus. Scan my postings and you will see many postings about this feature request. Scan for "phplist", "mandrill", "sendmail" etc. and you will find more from other users. This is no accident, that people ask for this in your forum and that there are even addons for this.

A professional newsletter feature is a lot more importat for ALL your customers than new emoticons in XF2.0!

Since 8 years (!) we are akking for this feature. Why XF is ignoring this? If that sound like I am pi..., it is because I am pi..., sorry.

If you are unsure, send out an email to all of us and kae a poll. But then you have also to live with the votes. And it is for sure, that at least 70-80% of your customers wants to have it.
More important than ahem...Emojis? 😲🙃🤪❗❓
 
@RobParker

Sometimes, you have to put the nose of someone onto a problem before he realizes, that there is a problem ;)

by the way: phplist is a free script and VERY professional. We only need an integration-port-bridge with XF

@Chris D

o.k., I respect that and do not go too much into detail here. But see it from this side:

1. We can not use push notification with iOS devices. As long as Apple does not support it, ressources are waisted, because then you have a 2class membersship.

2. We do not have an XF App, which would be the best way in modern times to communicate with users to get them back

So the only way to defend old classic forums like XF against the competition of Facebook & Co is sending emails to get users back.

This is the reason why it is so important. Is this so hard to see?
 
You're focus is on "getting users back" rather than "keeping them" in the first place. There are lots of community engagement tools that would lead to more users staying on your site rather than needing to be encouraged to come back. Stuff like Post Ratings addon massively helps with user engagement. Something like "trending content" has been shown to have the same effect, keeping users online for longer and making them more likely to participate in your community. I'd consider both of them more important than a newsletter (for example). If the XF team has limited resources then they have to prioritise.
 
Yes you can, it's just not free > XenPushover. Or free, but shady > Tapatalk. Or really expensive > custom app

Xenpushover costs a fortune, if you want to send many alerts. I have forums with which I have to email 30.000 users each week for each forum.

Tapatalk? No thanks. I do not give them my content for free ;)
 
You're focus is on "getting users back" rather than "keeping them" in the first place

It is the same. How do you think that Whatsapp, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter et alii can grow so strong and keep their users involved? Not because of likes. Because of notifications sent to their users in the "inbox", no matter wht knd of inbox that is (an app for example or via email).
 
You’re making an excellent argument for why push notifications are important!

XF already supports email notifications.

A newsletter isn’t either of those and doesn’t notify you of anything in real time. It does a very different job (to try and re-engage with users).
 
As Chris asked, this thread should not be only about newsletter demand. For all who are interested in this, I recommend to read a little bit in marketing books (Porter, Kotler/Bliemel, McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group et alii), to learn how important email newsletters are for every kind of business and interaction with the customer. If someone does not see it, I can not help.
 
Only in the same way it was before - you use [CODE=rich][/CODE].

There’s no syntax highlighting in that mode but you can control the formatting yourself.
 
There are 3 types of XF customers, much the same as 3 different types of customers of a corporate Help Desk.
1. The User
The user is the one that just uses the software, they are quiet, don't speak up much and often suffer in silence. They may install XF and perhaps just change the Logo and colour here and there.
2. The Power User
This type of user is the bread and butter of XF and would account for the majority of web sites out there. The problem with this type of user is they are not developers but try and bend software into something they want. In a corporate environment they are the ones that create macros in MS Excel to do things etc and thus are the biggest pain to a Help Desk as they know enough to get themselves into trouble. BUT, it is these people that MS has openly stated and realises as being their biggest income bracket and are the ones that they must listen to and try to satisfy hence why MS Office is so adaptable by simplifying VB into VBA. This is the customer base that XF ignores as Power Users are not typical grandstanders like developers are for fear of being told they are stupid plus developers speak the development language more with developers than Power Users.
3. The Developer
This group are usually the more vocal and seem to communicate with other developers in the same language, the same personality, which makes the developers on both sides of the software equation more relaxed at the cost of the biggest customer base, the Power User.

I come from the senior levels in corporate and can speak from initially being a developer to now a Power User and I can say that XF v2 is NOT what I like and the developer focus and skills needed to make an XF v2 site something absolutely brilliant like you can do with XF v1 is now very very limited pushing out the Power User. A Power User probably knows html to an advanced level and now just the templates are so far away from html, they are made more powerful so a young developer can understand them and not the average site Power User owner is in my opinion a very bad more. I personally feel that I can make my v1 XF site far greater than v2 which is why at this stage I probably will not renew my multiple XF licenses.

XF is now ignoring their biggest market, the Power User, and over the years I saw vBulletin go the same way and look at them now...perhaps it's time to look at the other solutions for Power Users like Burning Board and other offerings that are simple for the Power User to create some fantastically unbelievable sites in a very easy and more enjoyable way!
 
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