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.
 
Variations are disabled on existing styles by default when upgrading from previous versions, even for an unmodified default style.

You would have to click into the settings of the Default style and click the enable variations checkbox.
 
Variations are disabled on existing styles by default when upgrading from previous versions, even for an unmodified default style.

You would have to click into the settings of the Default style and click the enable variations checkbox.

Whoops! I think I remember that from the video now (at least I think it was mentioned there). Thanks Chris!
 
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.
Well yes. But I'm trying to add gravity to the situation because apparently people still aren't getting it. 🤣
 
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.
I will probably do that shortly. In a bizarre way, I'm curious to see which addons are going to break. Some do, but surprisingly (at least with 2.1 ➡️ 2.2), many still worked. I can also upgrade my own addons to work with 2.3; with all of mine (except one) being primarily template edits, it shouldn't be too difficult to deal with.
 
I will probably do that shortly. In a bizarre way, I'm curious to see which addons are going to break. Some do, but surprisingly (at least with 2.1 ➡️ 2.2), many still worked. I can also upgrade my own addons to work with 2.3; with all of mine (except one) being primarily template edits, it shouldn't be too difficult to deal with.
So far, I've tested a bit of AMS and UBS. Both seem to work no issues, and those are crucial addons for me.

Attn devs: How do we report other things besides bugs? I see a way to 'affected version' for bugs, but not for styling issues that I'm experiencing.
 
So far, I've tested a bit of AMS and UBS. Both seem to work no issues, and those are crucial addons for me.
Excellent! The XenCentral Trader Rating addon is crucial for ours, but I don't expect any problems there either. I already use custom template edits to change how it displays in our forums, so if anything needs tweaking, it would probably be my own code.
 
After making a backup, I tried the beta on our least-used forum, so I could restore if it blew up.

It blew up.

As it started the upgrade package, the screen messages turned blank. No more upgrade status. I gave it 10-15 min. to straighten itself out, and then ran a Restore of the domain. Maybe I'll try again some other time.
 
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