XF 2.4 XenForo 2.4 status and what's new under the hood?

Where are we?​

TL;DR: We're working hard to release XenForo 2.4 ASAP, but it's taking longer than expected due to scope changes and strategic decisions to wait for certain upstream developments that will benefit the long-term roadmap. Here's an analogy to explain why:

Software development is like planning a cross-country expedition with multiple destinations.

When you set out for version 2.4, you're not just driving to the next town over. You're charting a course through unknown territory with several strategic stops planned along the way - each representing a major milestone or feature release.

But the challenge is the landscape keeps changing along the journey.

• New roads open up (better technologies emerge)
• Bridges get washed out (dependencies break or become obsolete)
• You discover scenic routes that would benefit all future travellers (opportunities for architectural improvements)
• Weather conditions shift (market demands or user needs evolve)
• Your vehicle needs unexpected maintenance (technical debt must be addressed)

You can't just focus on reaching the immediate next stop. You must consider how each decision affects the entire journey ahead. Taking a shortcut to reach 2.4 faster might leave you stranded when trying to reach 3.0, 4.0 or even 5.0.

This is why scope changes occur: experienced developers are constantly recalibrating the route based on new information, ensuring the expedition can successfully reach not just the next destination, but all the strategic waypoints that follow.

The delays aren't detours, rather they're course corrections that keep the long-term journey viable.

To be slightly less cryptic, these are some of the specific challenges we have faced along the way:

A new Tiptap version is coming​

When we announced that Tiptap is coming to XenForo 2.4 it was 95% complete, and we then took a bit of a pause to work on other projects, which we have talked about since and will be discussing in this thread. Since then, Tiptap have announced Tiptap V3 which is currently in beta. Given how core the editor is to the forum experience, it makes a lot of sense to ship XenForo 2.4 with Tiptap V3 rather than Tiptap V2 as originally planned. While the changes involved are not too extensive, we also don't want to ship 2.4 with a dependency that is still in beta and subject to change. While we are not planning to wait for Tiptap V3 to be stable, necessarily, we do at least want to give it a little bit more time so we have a higher degree of confidence that we're shipping a stable editing experience.

We started talking about a rewrite (again)​

While this is not currently the direction we've decided to go in, it's responsible for us to at least consider all routes available to us to help us reach our destination.

After nearly 8 years since the release of XenForo 2.0, many of the technologies we use are showing their age, many of the decisions we made have started to slow us down more than we would like, and as a framework, XenForo becomes a less productive framework to work with. The solution to this problem can be to start from scratch, but we have ultimately decided that this is not something we need to do at this stage.

Instead, over the next few versions, including 2.4, we will be attempting to make iterative architectural changes to the framework so that we all have greater tools at our disposal to improve both the developer and user experience, particularly focusing on the implementation of developer tools and features that have become commonplace in other frameworks, such as Laravel.

Some of our best features are simply not finished​

There are one or two features that we see requested consistently from customers in our community forums and feedback channels, and we're excited to confirm they are coming in 2.4! However, it serves no one well if we release such highly-anticipated features before they are ready and before they have the usual level of quality, polish, and extensibility you would expect from a XenForo release. We'd rather take the extra time to get them right than rush them out and disappoint users with a subpar implementation that requires immediate patches or lacks the flexibility for customisation. We'll be sharing exciting details about what these features are and how they work in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

We can't keep up!​

I just counted and there are about 15 features that have been merged or are pending to be merged into XF 2.4 that we haven't announced yet. Some of these are smaller and aren't worthy of a dedicated HYS of their own (so they'll probably be rolled into a "miscellaneous" HYS or two), and some of these are going to be mentioned below, but while we have been "cooking" (as the kids say these days) it has meant that things like code reviews, and writing HYS posts hasn't been easy to balance. There is also potentially more stuff coming from generous contributions from esteemed developers such as @Xon and @digitalpoint, assuming we have time to implement (otherwise they will wait for... a future version).


With all of that now being said, while 2.4 is taking longer than we wanted, we have been busy and we are very much nearing the end of development.

And, while disappointing (to all of us) it is important to maintain perspective. XenForo 2.2 was released in September 2020. XenForo 2.3 was released nearly four years later. XenForo 2.4 is not 3 more years away.

But, you clicked this to find out what's new, right? So let's go.

 

[philmckrackon]

Too many useless features, it's not 2002-2010, not even 2020, wake up guys, its 2025, during last 2 years everything changed completely,
AI getting ahead of anything, people moved to mobiles, who is sitting at PC nowoday? developers because they use PC, admins of forums because can not be done on mobile phones & that is it! no one else! you must be focused on mobile version, look at this as user, not as admin or developer. if not, in 2-3 years that moment will be gone forever!
Do you really think user know how to use tiptap? they need another year just to understand, additional year to use it!
create credit system, wallet, shop, products, payment systems, vouchers, referal system as core addons, ios & android apps, that would massively give oportunity for forum admins to earn.

The majority of my users are on a PC due to the specifics of my topics. Since it mainly concerns a specific vehicle from 1971 - 1986 my user base is slanted to an older demographic. Heck, they can be so expensive that even the older crowd struggles on purchasing and upkeep.

 

[Mendalla]

Do you really think user know how to use tiptap? they need another year just to understand, additional year to use it!

Do users now actually know they are using Froala to type their posts? Likely not. All Xenforo needs to do is embed Tiptap in a similar way to Froala and no one will be the wiser. In the end, almost all editors right up to full-on word processors work roughly the same, it's just that there are more capabilities as you move up the scale. I don't think anyone using forums today needs help with any editor

Beyond that, I second or third or whatever what Chris and others have said.

 

[ge66]

Last 30 days my forum had 13% on desktop and 85% on mobile, my user will not be helped by an app. I have a lot of users 65+

 

[Miri]

I remember back when I was searching for the right software for my community. I tried a lot of different platforms both paid and free. But I noticed something: during the demo phase, every time I tested XenForo, I found myself writing and writing, post after post.

With the others, I’d get distracted, thinking, “Oh, this is nice,” or “That looks cool,” but their approach to the editor just didn’t draw me in it didn’t inspire me to actually write anything.

XenForo, on the other hand, felt like a tunnel like the whole site was built around the editor, almost hypnotizing you into writing something. So in that aspect, XenForo really stands out.

Another thing maybe this is more of a personal preference but I really appreciate how the design and interface don’t have all that unnecessary padding and spacing between elements. Everything feels perfectly balanced.

I also love how they’ve handled font weights for titles and text it gives the right visual hierarchy and focus, something many third-party XenForo style designers tend to mess up. They make things look nice, but end up making them visually dull. That’s definitely not a flaw you can pin on XenForo.

It works beautifully on mobile too I’ve never, and I mean never, had a single issue. Same goes for uploading attachments smooth, simple, and reliable.

Sure, I’d love to see more new features or updates that’s an area where I could be a bit more critical but when it comes to design, XenForo is top tier.

 

[Suzanne O]

Too many useless features, it's not 2002-2010, not even 2020, wake up guys, its 2025, during last 2 years everything changed completely,
AI getting ahead of anything, people moved to mobiles, who is sitting at PC nowoday? developers because they use PC, admins of forums because can not be done on mobile phones & that is it! no one else! you must be focused on mobile version, look at this as user, not as admin or developer. if not, in 2-3 years that moment will be gone forever!
Do you really think user know how to use tiptap? they need another year just to understand, additional year to use it!
create credit system, wallet, shop, products, payment systems, vouchers, referal system as core addons, ios & android apps, that would massively give oportunity for forum admins to earn.

Wait what? Oh and TL;DR

 

[Arnox]

Funnily enough, you know, I personally think I'd just be happy with a migration to an editor that was as stable as Froala on XF 2.1.x specifically. lol More features would also be great too, but yeah, for some reason, 2.1.x seemed to be the most stable and rock-solid version in general, and I remember very few, if any issues with the editor at that time.

Our site was once using 2.1.x for a long while there and I did love how easily and straightforward the editor was able to be both read and manipulated. Quotes worked great. Spoilers didn't cut off quoted text. Able to super easily turn off Markdown... (Although that option's still in 2.3.x. May or may not be in 2.4.x. )

 

[DragonByte Tech]

There's a tone throughout your post that we are behind the times? Do you really think in 2025 people are putting in someone else's name (Or clicking a link) when they're registering to a website?

The year is 2005. You can't afford vBulletin even though vB3's AdminCP demo blew you away, so you run wBB (the version of vB2 that had the function names translated to German). Your members are spamming their friends on MSN Messenger so they can win the award for most referrals this month. xXxSephirothxXx is looking set to win the award. You've left your computer on for three consecutive days trying to download this new MMORPG "World of Warcraft". You're still rocking your Nokia 3310. You're the school Snake champion. You're still upset at your mum for turning off your PlayStation because you hadn't done your homework, and it had been two hours since the last save point.

 

[Arnox]

The year is 2005. You can't afford vBulletin even though vB3's AdminCP demo blew you away, so you run wBB (the version of vB2 that had the function names translated to German). Your members are spamming their friends on MSN Messenger so they can win the award for most referrals this month. xXxSephirothxXx is looking set to win the award. You've left your computer on for three consecutive days trying to download this new MMORPG "World of Warcraft". You're still rocking your Nokia 3310. You're the school Snake champion. You're still upset at your mum for turning off your PlayStation because you hadn't done your homework, and it had been two hours since the last save point.

For me, I miss all the vB4 forums. Seemed to be the perfect blend of old, stable design along with new and much wanted features. Just for example, vB3 didn't have sidebars without modding, but such a simple thing was actually quite handy for, if anything else, seeing what were the latest posts in one quick view. I get major nostalgia every time I see the occasional vB4 forum still operational.

Of course, it's way too outdated to run now, security wise... Ah well. XF 2.x is definitely the best replacement for it.

 

[FTL]

You're still upset at your mum for turning off your PlayStation because you hadn't done your homework, and it had been two hours since the last save point.

Great satire and I love this line especially.

 

[Jimsef]

I have come from phpbb and I absolutely love xenforo... it has exceeded my expectations for sure. The only two niggles I have is the confusing "attach files vs attach image"... seems to confuse a lot of people, and the lack of ability (or even an addon) to watermark images. With the amount of scraping that goes on it was great that phpbb had a watermarking addon.

 

[Suzanne O]

I have come from phpbb and I absolutely love xenforo... it has exceeded my expectations for sure. The only two niggles I have is the confusing "attach files vs attach image"... seems to confuse a lot of people, and the lack of ability (or even an addon) to watermark images. With the amount of scraping that goes on it was great that phpbb had a watermarking addon.

If you go to your customer account there is the media gallery addon that has what you're after.

 

[Mendalla]

For me, I miss all the vB4 forums.

I have a VB3 forum that I still visit occasionally. Local service site and tied tightly to some other functions of the site so he's never had the inclination to upgrade or switch since it would screw up a bunch other functionality of the site. The only other VB site I was on regularly switched to Xenforo around the time I upgraded from 1.5 to 2.1.

 

[Jimsef]

If you go to your customer account there is the media gallery addon that has what you're after.

I know that, I’m talking about the normal attachments not the media gallery

 

[ebikes.com]

XenForo uses a few components like symfony/cache, symfony/console, symfony/mailer and symfony/process but it is not build on the full framework, eg. doesn't use Doctrine.

The minimal use of the framework and a lot of caching is the reason why Xenforo is very snappy.
We develop very high performance software using a minimalist framework and were impressed by the implementation, because if we wrote it our way, it'd only be maybe ~10% faster.

If you rewrote it in Laravel, and leaned on the framework too much, it'd run substantially slower and not be any better to develop on tbh.


I'm with chrisD.

Xenforo works pretty good on mobile already. Some tweaks are needed to make it work excellently, but i'd call it good out of the box.
Tiptap is a better WYSIWYG editor than froala and should make for a nicer user experience.
Usability of this software is really good compared to all forum software out there.

The idea of turning a longform format into social media is silly. People come to forums for longform content, and also to get away from the lower IQ of social media users. Don't invite them in too much

 

[FTL]

The idea of turning a longform format into social media is silly. People come to forums for longform content, and also to get away from the lower IQ of social media users. Don't invite them in too much

Exactly, so well said.

 

[DragonByte Tech]

@Chris D quick question regarding the repository().fetch() changes in 2.3.7; can you share whether it's planned to deprecate Repository calls in templates entirely in 2.4 and/or 3.0?

Personally I'm going to remove all the Repository calls in templates in my addons since it makes usage checks/refactoring harder for no real reason, I'm just curious whether this is something all addon devs might want to get a headstart on

 

[Chris D]

I'm not sure how aggressive it will be, yet, but ultimately we do want a stronger separation between data and view layers. While potentially useful in some contexts, for the most part, there's no reason to be triggering explicit database interaction in templates. (Implicit interactions, such as those triggered, e.g. accessing relations are fine, but {$repo.findSomething().fetch()} is probably better when the result is passed from the controller).

 

[DragonByte Tech]

Thanks I fully agree with the separation, especially since I'd also wager you'd like to reduce or eliminate the Namespace:Reference shortname syntax at some point as well