XenForo 2.0 Discussion

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Had not heard of that one before your post. After looking into it, what I've seen looks horrible to me, among the worst visually, unless I'm missing something. I also noticed they have a paid option at ridiculous pricing levels.

I think XF is one of the best things since sliced bread in terms of UI and how it works, but in all honesty after looking at the version 2 example a while ago, it looked rather flat indeed to me. Hard for me to like that flat look.

I was just searching for it to look again, here it is: https://xf2demo.xenforo.com/.

That is amazingly "dry" and "minimalist." Do people really like that style nowadays? Sometimes I do like that, but not for a discussion forum where I want to spend time discussing and conversing. It is mostly clear and "clean," but the flat dryness is still difficult to take I think. Things also seem much more cramped closer together as well, too much so for my taste. Perhaps I could learn to like it.
 
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The next stage of the process will be the developer preview (alpha), as soon as it is ready. It will be available to all customers with an active license.
 
Does anyone know a rough ideal time when XF2 will be released at all? I only ask because I will be looking to redesign my forum very soon, so depending on how soon it gets released could affect whether not I should delay development (really don't want to pay twice for a redesign too close together lol)
 
Does anyone know a rough ideal time when XF2 will be released at all? I only ask because I will be looking to redesign my forum very soon, so depending on how soon it gets released could affect whether not I should delay development (really don't want to pay twice for a redesign too close together lol)

Then just wait till 2.0 to get released. There is as far as I know no rough time frame. It's just gonna friends on many different things found during the demo and alpha, beta, and RC stages.
 
Then just wait till 2.0 to get released. There is as far as I know no rough time frame. It's just gonna friends on many different things found during the demo and alpha, beta, and RC stages.
I'm probably not going to do that as the release probably isn't going to happen for a while. I was just asking here to try and see if that is likely to be true. The redesign I'm doing is something which I need to try and have completed over the next few months (the backend on my current one seems incredibly messy, most likely due with me being very unexperienced with this sort of stuff haha)
 
Does anyone know a rough ideal time when XF2 will be released at all? I only ask because I will be looking to redesign my forum very soon, so depending on how soon it gets released could affect whether not I should delay development (really don't want to pay twice for a redesign too close together lol)
I would suggest going ahead with your development. XF2 is currently in Alpha and has a few stages to go through yet; then there's the official Resource Manager and Extended Search add-ons to sort - nevermind all the third-party add-on rewrites that will need to be undertaken. During all that time you can be growing your content and community. And even when all that is done, you'll still only get roughly what you've got now as the aim is for parity with XF1 before they stride off into broader XF2 development. (y)
 
I would suggest going ahead with your development. XF2 is currently in Alpha and has a few stages to go through yet; then there's the official Resource Manager and Extended Search add-ons to sort - nevermind all the third-party add-on rewrites that will need to be undertaken. During all that time you can be growing your content and community. And even when all that is done, you'll still only get roughly what you've got now as the aim is for parity with XF1 before they stride off into broader XF2 development. (y)
That was my initial though, though thought I'd check in the optimistic, but very unlikely, event the release would be fairly soon lol
 
"even when all that is done, you'll still only get roughly what you've got now"
Pretty much sums it up.

There's an editor for the navigation bar which we've all been doing with Jake's excellent Navbar Tabs addon.
There's widgets which could be interesting for design, but this is also already in play with some very good addons.
Apart from that, nothing of interest for admins.

On the other negative side ALL addons will have to be "updated" i.e. redone, so lots of extra costs and labour to get back to square one.

A design which is extreme vanilla, so very few will be able to use it, pressuring need to create or buy a design. That means expense and/ or hours of labour. Redoing current design is for most extremely time consuming, again just to get back to square one.

Meanwhile some of the best devs are already leaving XF not liking the prospect so the competition for services of those left behind is going to be difficult. It was already bad with too few devs.

Just have to hope it'll all pick up again. XF has known bad times before and come through them.
 
Very excited and optimistic about the XF 2.0 my developers and I are on the edges of our seats waiting for the preview release (Alpha) .. Once that is out we will treat it as the firing gun we have been waiting for and will begin the race to replicate the main custom plug ins we built for VB 3.8.6 and will keep a 'warm' migrated version of the forums basic threads and posts to begin testing and doing our graphical front end custom work on.

We now have an 'all pause" policy on any major new VB3 custom work.

It will be exciting to see XF2 ready Add Ons emerge and float to the top (like cream?!) and when we are done with graphics and functionality replication - (Q3 2017?) we hope we can cherry pick some XF 2.0 ready 'essentials'
 
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You're certainly not alone in that some people currently prefer the XF1 style over the XF2 style, though this is hardly unexpected. There will be some people who genuinely don't like it, but I would expect a majority of them will take their time to adjust to it, and at the end may prefer it.

That said, the feedback we've received so far suggests the people who prefer the XF1 style are in the minority.

Hardly scientific, but hopefully the results of this poll will be somewhat representative, and ultimately the margin will reduce as a) it grows on people and b) they find it easier to get the look and feel that they like for their own forum:

https://xf2demo.xenforo.com/threads/comparing-styles-between-xf1-and-xf2.1456/
 
I find myself wondering if the reason why XF2 looks the way it does is because that plays better on a phone screen, and if the focus is on that. I realize mobile is certainly a big trend and hugely significant in society in general, but personally the last thing I would want to do in terms of forums is use them by phone. I'm a desktop guy. Give me a nice big keyboard to do real typing and a normal size screen. Or is that not it?
 
I find myself wondering if the reason why XF2 looks the way it does is because that plays better on a phone screen, and if the focus is on that. I realize mobile is certainly a big trend and hugely significant in society in general, but personally the last thing I would want to do in terms of forums is use them by phone. I'm a desktop guy. Give me a nice big keyboard to do real typing and a normal size screen. Or is that not it?

Maybe not all forums are mobile dominated, but the computer sales has been telling big brand names that sell computers, tablets and phones that it is tablet and mobile. Tablet barely registers as a traffic margin for me. But it outsold desktops. Mobile is 60-80% depending on the market. Some forums, read by computer admins are desktop orientated.

Apples latest laptop offering demonstrates their focus is not on laptops.

Mass market = mass device = mobile phones. Android / iPhone is almost 50/50 (iphone is more popular) on my forum.

I think the xenforo developers are going in the right direction. Anyhow if you don't like the default theme as said before plenty of people making good themes to suit your niche.

But oh I don't want to have to pay for one! But oh there should be more devs for xenforo! Pick one. Hide the other.
 
Well I certainly would not say it's bad either, and as I suggested above perhaps I could come to like it, and as Chris suggested perhaps I could be among those who adjust to it. That certainly seems possible for me. Maybe months from now I'll be saying how I like it. It certainly also does have some positive qualities in my view despite not being my first preference overall for style. And if there was a theme that I liked which worked well then all the better if it's not a problem or too expensive.

As far as mobile goes - it's clear that many people use that for Facebook, for example. On FB, you generally have short, clipped, terse commenting and joking. With some exceptions, or partial exceptions, you almost never have real discussion or real conversation, which is what a forum is for. Is there evidence to suggest that people like to use mobile for a real forum that uses software like XF the way they like to use it for something like FB? While I'm not a "millennial" anymore in terms of age and haven't been for years, for instance, I can honestly say that if people were walking around with smartphones they way they do now when I was, I still would never have wanted to be doing things like that on a phone or a tablet. To me that would not be enjoyable. What would be enjoyable to me is what I'm doing now, which is sitting at a desk with a full size monitor and a real keyboard to do real typing, and a UI style that has a little pleasant visual richness and depth as this UI has without going overboard. Laptop users also count as "desktop" in that sense. In fact, I would also like a little more richness and depth in that department, so there is room for more with me without going overboard yet. That's actually also one of the things I have always liked about VB as a forum user too.

(And look at all that I typed here - that's not even a super long forum post. But isn't that a lot to do on a phone or tablet?)
 
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Why isn't utf8mb4 support automatically added during the upgrade to XF 2? How do you go about adding it after the upgrade? Can it be added on XF 1?
 
Because it's entirely optional and dependent on being able to use a MySQL version that supports it.

It's also a potentially intensive operation so the process is run from the command line:
Code:
php cmd.php xf:convert-utf8mb4

No, we won't be adding support to XF1.
 
This won't be a problem for me since I have a VPS, but how will sites that are on shared hosting that don't have shell access add support for utf8mb4?
 
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