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:

1710840900122.webp


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.

1710842859242.webp


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

1710842915614.webp


Advanced search with much more granular options? Of course!

1710843037080.webp


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.
 
If you can troubleshoot, take the risk knowing that any mess up is your own fault, and you're the one dealing with the mess you make.
If you can't troubleshoot, then wait till at least RC1, and preferably official release.

If your site has any value, there is no point in taking a risk over something that really gives you little to no benefit right now.
 
Last edited:
So facing a couple of weird issues on Beta 4 on my site lol. Safari users do not see style variant at their end but they do see it here. And push notifications are taking me to homepage instead of the actual thread. Using default theme with minimal customizations. And both issues are not present here. Minor annoyances which I hope disappear by themselves in future builds.

Update: Leaving this update here in case I need to refer to it in future… I managed to find the issue with style selection. Bunch of users on my forum were having issues with the imported themes from 2.2. So I decided to disable them all and make the new fresh default theme freshly created in 2.3 as the only option. This sort of created a mess as people ended up stuck on dark variant with no option to switch to auto/light. Took me a while to realize that for some reason, users settings were still showing old disabled themes even though they were not allowed the use them. I had to run the sql query to switch all users to the latest theme id update xf_user set style_id=42; (42 was the style id for the fresh new 2.3 theme for me).
 
Last edited:
Reminder: this thread isn't for support. Please post bug reports or support threads if relevant.

Style variants are disabled by default for each style. They have to be enabled explicitly by editing the style and once you do any colour properties would need to be adjusted manually if not the default colours.
 
Top Bottom