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.

 

[Paul B]

It will rise, but in a speed so slow that you don't see it moving.

DraxForo

 

[nodle]

DraxForo

 

[StarArmy]

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.

I moved from phpBB to XF circa 2013. There is one thing I miss from phpBB that Xenforo is sorely lacking: phpBB has a user-facing groups page where users can manage their group memberships and this is super useful for making groups like "HP laptop owners" vs "Dell laptop owners" where the users can sort themselves into the groups that show them the relevant forums. Anything where the group is basically a club members can freely join or leave on their own.

For an RPG site like mine, I could use it for members of certain roleplay groups like people whose characters crew a starship. It's always bugged me that groups always require staff intervention on XF (unless you're promoting user based on an upgrade).

 

[Wildcat Media]

10 years ago I started to see a swing towards mobile, consistent across the years, but it’s kind of settled recently with 50% being phones and the rest split between other devices and computers.

Not to disagree that a mobile first approach is a good idea, but to say nobody else uses computers is actually just wrong.

I think it is still 54% of our users. We need them

Across a few forums, I'm seeing mobile usage from about 45% to 55%, so I just tell staff that roughly half of our visits are on mobile devices. And yes, forums that skew older will lean more towards computers, as to those (like me) who write a lot and need the speed and precision of a physical keyboard.

Some people are still so app-centric that they either can't understand why we don't have an app, or don't understand why we won't use one of those services like Tapatalk to give them an app to bang away on.

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.

That has been my argument as well. The only thing users notice about Froala is that certain functions don't work correctly. The latest thing on our forum is that when uploading a photo, the browser jumps to the top of the page, then back down when it's complete. But for many versions now, I have had an issue where using keyboard shortcuts to activate and deactivate italics, bold, etc. You can activate it, but it sometimes takes several key-mashings to get it to deactivate.

Most users, though, will see the same strip of editor controls that they've seen on our forums for over 13 years now. And for many of us, the first GUI word processors had the exact same editing controls, so it feels like home and we are very productive. As long as TipTap keeps the keyboard shortcuts, we'll be happy. It is extremely unproductive to write a long article with dozens of italicized titles, for instance, and have to fork around with a mouse to highlight and italicize. And I'm not about to suffer through Markdown ever again in my life.

 

[Alvin63]

Could you do something to make user banners easier to turn on and off? Rather than having to use promotions for certain banners, which can get complicated?