XF 2.3 XenForo 2.3 Beta 1 now available. What's next? What's new?

It's finally here! Today we are pleased to mark the next major milestone towards a stable release of XenForo 2.3 and this time we need your help!

As per the announcement XenForo 2.3 Beta 1 is now available to all licensed self-hosted customers. We'd very much appreciate your thoughts, your feedback, and your uncanny ability to break things in ways we can't even imagine. But, as ever, please do not even contemplate installing it on your live forum at this point. There will be bugs; some of which we know about and are yet to be fixed, and others which are yet to be discovered. No support is provided for Beta releases aside from saying "we told you so" and advising you to restore from a backup! 😉

Please for goodness sake, take a backup.

Now, while all of that is out of the way, you're probably wondering what the process looks like from here and what's new.

What's next?​

Our aim for the next few weeks, starting today, is to showcase a number of features we have been finalising since our last 'Have you seen...?' in November. Most of these are smaller in scope and will be limited to one or two features/improvements per post. At least one of the future HYS posts will outline new features or improvements in our three official add-ons, Resource Manager, Media Gallery and Enhanced Search. These improvements are not in the initial Beta release but they are definitely coming!

There will of course be a lot of activity surrounding bug fixes and feedback. We will continue with pre-release versions through Beta and Release Candidate releases until we deem the release is sufficiently stable. We will of course work towards this as quickly as is humanly possible, but simultaneously work is continuing towards XenForo 3.0! Progress is going so well with XF3 that we at one point joked that it could be released before XenForo 2.3! This of course is not going to happen but, nonetheless, it is shaping up nicely and we'll be excited to show more of that once we are ready.

What's new?​

Direct message search is here!​

If you're anything like me, you might have built up a few direct messages over the years:

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That's over 4,600!

Aside from being able to filter based on recipient, finding something from months or years gone by can be a challenge to say the least. So starting with XenForo 2.3 Beta 1 we are making direct message search available.

There isn't a great deal to show you here. It's search. It's the same search system you use to search forums and other content. When on direct message related pages there is a "Direct messages" option in the dropdown. If you're inside a direct message you can even limit your search to finding content within that specific direct message.

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Search results look how you expect, surfacing both found content within the direct message (conversation) itself and replies.

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Advanced search with much more granular options? Of course!

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And that's it for this week! We hope you enjoy your first look at XenForo 2.3 "in the flesh" and, as ever, we appreciate your invaluable assistance in testing and providing feedback.
 
There are reasons which will become apparent (in the coming weeks, not days) but above everything else, version 2 was released in 2015. Version 7 was released in 2019. Running anything below 6 right now is highly questionable and given how long even Elasticsearch 7 has been around more than anything it's just the right time.
 
Yes, we are running XenForo 2.3 Beta 1 here.

The "risk level" is extremely high, to the point that we've stressed repeatedly that you should not install it on a live forum.

Yes, I had seen the comments, but since Xenforo works correctly except for specific errors, I did not think that the risk was so high. Thanks you!!
 
yeah. iirc, i installed 2.2 beta 3 on my board and even then it was quite risky to do. with 2.3, i might wait till second or third 2.3.x release coz of all the potential issues surrounding jquery removal and addon dependency on it.
 
Good God do not install on a forum you are not okay with losing everything on it lol
I mean it is highly unlikely you would "lose everything on it". Almost impossible, in fact. Because you would all be sensible, do a backup first, produce a staging environment from the backup, do the upgrade and test thoroughly before upgrading the live site.

At that point you know the backup works (because you produced a test environment with it) and if anything goes wrong that can just be restored.

We do need brave people who have the time and patience to at least go through with the test site process there as obviously we need the feedback across a range of environments.

You can then use your own judgement as to whether it could be installed onto your live sites (after thorough testing). But downloading it and installing it now? Not without all of those other steps first.
 
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