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.

 

[MySiteGuy]

And - despite it's age - it has in opposite to XenForo a search function that finds two- and three letter words (but seems to be limited to 200 results per search).

It's quite easy to get 2 and 3 letter searches in Xenforo without changing a line of code.

Edit - you don't even need Elasticsearch to do it.

 

[ust]

It's quite easy to get 2 and 3 letter searches in Xenforo without changing a line of code.

Edit - you don't even need Elasticsearch to do it.

Only if you can change the SQL-server configuration. Many LAMP-Providers do not offer that.

 

[MySiteGuy]

Only if you can change the SQL-server configuration. Many LAMP-Providers do not offer that.

The point being, people often blame Xenforo (or other software package) for limitations their host imposes.

Setting fulltext minimum word length is something I've done since 2003 or 2004, after MySQL made this setting available.

For what it's worth, it's a good idea to update the stopwords list with 2 and 3 letter words you want excluded because the index size can become very large when you include shorter words. I also set the maximum length to something reasonable, because generally people aren't searching on 20+ character words and those can also impact the index size.

 

[mjda]

Longest ever gap between HYS threads (for the same version), longest ever gap between first HYS and it's release.

This might be because historically HYS threads aren't started until the development is basically complete. With 2.4 they decided that the HYS threads should be posted as things get done. Doesn't really explain why we haven't had another one in five months, unless maybe they haven't actually finished anything new since then.

we'll be sharing Have you seen...? posts more frequently. Traditionally, these posts would be saved up until the end of the development cycle. We will now be publishing them sporadically as development completes on each feature.

 

[duderuud]

@Chris D Any updates? It was promised there would be better communication but so far it stayed extremely quiet.

What also worries me is that @Kier only posted twice in two years, can you elaborate on that too? Is he out of the picture or not?

 

[StarArmy]

If communication is not happening due to time constraints, perhaps it could be automated in some way, where there's a weekly tracker that posts something on the forum like:

• During week 49, Chris updated the following files:
  • includes/handlers/somepage.php
  • lib/tpl/somepage.less

It doesn't have to be super specific on what changes are made line by line. It could be shared through an RSS feed or API.

Seeing signs of work happening might provide customers with a sense of progress and transparency.

 

[smallwheels]

If communication is not happening due to time constraints

Today it is five months since the last update. Hard to believe that over this period no one form the team would have had the 30-60min to write a proper update (let alone the 5mins it would take to drop a short status note). It is. safe bet to say that the silence is not caused by time constraints but by other reasons.

 

[nodle]

@Chris D Any updates? It was promised there would be better communication but so far it stayed extremely quiet.

What also worries me is that @Kier only posted twice in two years, can you elaborate on that too? Is he out of the picture or not?

The odds of you getting a response...

 

[Jimsef]

…. The race is on…. XF 2.4 vs GTA6!

 

[mjda]

The good news is that we can rest assured knowing that DPReview is being taken care of. I'm glad we got that update...

DPR will continue to assess feedback and consider adding a threaded option back if it's deemed appropriate.

Backups are run twice a day for each site. The database is dumped and a diff of the files produces a snapshot which is then encrypted and hosted off-site. A number of snapshots are retained over a 12 month period so we have good recovery potential for the last couple of days, the last week, the last month, and every month over the last 12.

 

[Kevin]

Fixed Post in thread 'The native emojis of the device are shown and not those of JoyPixels.'

Mar 3, 2023

And what's really pitiful... this is coming from someone with a decade of XF use that was a strong proponent of it. They seem to have "lost their way" recently.

Indeed. At this point it is starting to feel more-and-more like XF is just a 'side hustle' for the guys who are still left.

• Kevin

• 

 

[mjda]

Fixed Post in thread 'The native emojis of the device are shown and not those of JoyPixels.'

Mar 3, 2023

And what's really pitiful... this is coming from someone with a decade of XF use that was a strong proponent of it. They seem to have "lost their way" recently.

Indeed. At this point it is starting to feel more-and-more like XF is just a 'side hustle' for the guys who are still left.

• Kevin

• 

Yeah, it certainly doesn't "feel" like development is moving at the same pace it once was, but we also don't really have any idea what's going on behind the scenes. Maybe what they're working on now simply requires more code, or more modification to existing code to get it right. Maybe there are other devs who have finished their coding commitments and have moved on to other things. Maybe they have some other major additions, ala the cloud, that they're working on behind the scenes.

Of course we don't know these things becuase they're not being communicated to us, even though more communication was an area that they admitted they were lacking, and stated they'd do better, in.

I feel confident saying that a vast majority of customers would be just fine with Chris, or any of the other devs for that matter, taking one hour per month out of their development time to post an update to the customer base what's been going on over the last several weeks. How are things coming along? What kind of snags have y'all hit? Heck, even just how are y'all doing, personally? I remember when the XF devs used to be a part of this community. Now I suspect there are people around here who may not even know who the devs are, which is just sad IMO.

What have us customers done, as a whole, to deserve to be ignored? I'd seriously be interested in knowing this. We're basically begging for some kind of communication here. At this point it's clear that we're being intentionally "left on read". Are those of us who still believe in, and support, this software not worth at least a single update per month? Timelines and roadmaps aside, how are things coming along?

 

[Swiftman]

The good news is that we can rest assured knowing that DPReview is being taken care of. I'm glad we got that update...

For the record, for the XenForo devs that are reading this, if onboarding a huge, high-profile, deep-pocketed customer like DPReview to the Cloud platform has simply taken a ton of development time away from 2.4, PLEASE tell us that. That, in my opinion, is CLEARLY great news for the XenForo ecosystem that I'd love to know. Huge "whales" moving to the XenForo cloud give me tons of confidence in the long-term prognosis of XenForo development and diverting development efforts for a handful of months to catch such an enormous whale seems well worth it long-term to me. If that's what occurred, it needs to be communicated though in my opinion.

 

[FTL]

What have us customers done, as a whole, to deserve to be ignored? I'd seriously be interested in knowing this. We're basically begging for some kind of communication here. At this point it's clear that we're being intentionally "left on read". Are those of us who still believe in, and support, this software not worth at least a single update per month? Timelines and roadmaps aside, how are things coming along?

This. ^^ It's quite disrespectful, isn't it? It's only natural for people to start speculating negatively when this happens, especially when it happens over and over and against promises to keep us updated. Come on XF, let us know what's happening.

 

[abnvet]

I’ve stayed out of these threads for a long time. You always get the same replies — people saying “just be happy with what you have,” or others acting like any concern is complaining. That’s never been my angle.


I came to XenForo back when everything blew up at vBulletin. I’ve always tried to support smaller teams, and at the time it genuinely felt like a big company was trying to crush a pair of developers. Anyone who lived through that era remembers how active the XF team was back then — constant communication, public updates, transparency. They had to be. And honestly, that early communication helped build the loyalty this community still shows today.


Fast-forward to now: threads like this drag on for months, and the silence around 2.4 makes no sense. I don’t run a big commercial forum, but I do care about keeping my software up to date and getting the most out of the license I paid for. I’ve been waiting at least half a year for this release — not for shiny features, but because I want to feel like the product I invest in has forward momentum and a clear future.


As a business owner myself, I know exactly what happens when communication stops: people start filling the gaps with rumors, theories, and frustration. That’s exactly what’s happening here. I don’t blame the community at all — when there’s no roadmap, no timeline, and almost no visible communication, people naturally start trying to explain the situation on their own.


For me, this is about confidence. XenForo is great software. The code quality has always been excellent. But confidence doesn’t come from silence. It comes from a team that shows they’re present, that they care, that they’re steering the ship, and that they can give customers realistic expectations.


And that’s what’s missing.


It genuinely saddens me to see things in this state after following this product from the beginning. At some point you have to ask yourself if it makes sense to keep investing time and money into something that feels like a side project — because from the outside, that’s exactly the impression the current communication creates.


I’m not here to stir up drama. I’m not demanding daily updates. I’m simply asking:
Is it unreasonable to expect a basic roadmap, a timeline, or even occasional communication so customers know the direction of the product?


And I’m going to say this with complete respect: if Kier has moved on, that’s understandable — everyone deserves to live their life. But if he hasn’t, then for the love of sanity, hearing his voice again after all these years would go a long way for a community that has supported this product since the beginning.
Chris D is fantastic — many of us remember when he was just creating add-ons — and from the outside it feels like he’s the only one still visible.


I love XenForo. I want it to succeed. But communication matters, and right now the silence is hurting confidence more than anything else ever could.

 

[JamesBrown]

Here’s how I see it:

Everyone venting about “poor communication” seems to think that bi*ching like this will magically make XF open up more. It won’t. If the owners wanted to give a running commentary on their internal delays, decisions, or development challenges, they absolutely could. They’re not stupid, and they know exactly how their silence looks. But they’ve chosen not to operate that way.

Clearly something hasn’t gone to plan for them. That doesn’t mean they owe us blow-by-blow updates. It just means they’re dealing with whatever is happening behind the scenes in the way they think is best.

At the end of the day, you bought a software licence, not shares in XenForo Ltd. A licence gives you access to a product that is still best-in-class. Renewals are optional. But buying a software licence doesn’t entitle anyone to question the company’s internal communication style or development pace.

People can be disappointed or frustrated, that’s fine, but some of the outrage feels like it’s based on a misunderstanding of what you actually purchased. You bought a great bit of software for very little money, use it or don't.

 

[duderuud]

That is (probably) all true.

But don't promise to communicate more and in practise stay even more silent compared to earlier. That is plain bad practice.

 

[Suzanne O]

That is (probably) all true.

But don't promise to communicate more and in practise stay even more silent compared to earlier. That is plain bad practice.

Remember all of you guys who whinged caused @Paul B to temporarly close the 2.4 feedback/complaints thread.
That just tells all of us to shut up stop whinging about it.
You just do not have a clue on what the negativity does to a small business.

 

[CedricV]

45 pages later...

I don't really care anymore, but I find it amusing that everyone stays so persistent. You aren't getting more communication, you aren't getting faster development cycles. Stop complaining or move on to other software like I did. Which I haven't regretted one bit. But please, carry on complaining...

 

[JamesBrown]

move on to other software like I did.

Not quite left the forum though, have you. Would your new forum software provider allow you to post on their forum even though you were not a customer?