XenForo & Add-ons 2.3.0 Beta 6 Released (Unsupported)

This week (and a bit) we have been extremely busy working towards that enticing milestone of a stable release. There's still a little while to go with a healthy number of bugs, feedback and other bits in our backlog that we'd like to work through, but each release represents a significant amount of effort and progress towards the end goal.

While we have mostly focused on bug fixes and other stability improvements, this has resulted in some notable changes which you should be aware of.

Multibyte string handling​

We have been deferring this handling to a third party piece of code for a number of years which has done a great job, but after a recent discussion and bug report about it we have decided to modernise this code and bring it into the XF core itself. Developers will now find most of this functionality under the new XF\Util\Str class. Worried about your code that no doubt has used various utf8_ functions in the past? Fear not because we now ship a shim file which proxies those legacy function names to their analogous functions in the new Str class. Though we highly recommend updating existing code to utilise the new Str class as soon as possible as the utf8.php shim is already deprecated and will be removed in XenForo 3.0.

Some of the new Str class has been rewritten to, wherever possible, make use of methods provided by the PHP mbstring extension. This means that, much like many other modern PHP applications and frameworks, XenForo 2.3 now has a hard requirement for the mbstring extension to be available. While not shipped by default, it's highly likely you already have it available. To check if it is, all you have to do is look at the "Server environment report" on your admin control panel index.

The new Str class is making use of modern PHP syntax including enforcing return types and argument types. This may mean that you could see an increase in the number of server error logs related to these string functions. This is intentional. Those logs will likely represent a bug in an add-on's code and therefore should be reported to the add-on developer in the first instance.

Click here to read more about these changes.

Entity ViewableInterface and IndexNow​

Any entity which is configured to be "indexable` via the XF:Indexable entity behavior and is configured to enqueueIndexNow now requires the implementation of the new ViewableInterface. This is to ensure that your entity has an appropriate canView method so that we can determine content is viewable by a guest before submission to IndexNow. Developers will need to implement this interface and add a canView method (if needed) to ensure content can be submitted to IndexNow.

Automatic webhook configuration via PayPal's REST API​

There is no longer a manual step required to configure webhook verification when using the new PayPal payment provider. Upon creating a payment profile, we use API calls to create and configure the webhook automatically, no longer requiring that as a separate manual step and copy/pasting the webhook ID. If you happen to receive payment provider logs about webhooks not being able to be verified, it will be worth toggling off and on the checkbox for enabling webhook verification to see if that resolves the issue.

That's it for this week, we're off to swat some more bugs. Please read the rest of this post for the standard upgrade boilerplate text

We strongly recommend anyone testing 2.3 during this beta period upgrade as each beta version is released.

More specific details regarding bugs fixed in this release can be found in the resolved bugs forum.

This is beta software. It is not officially supported.
We do not recommend running it in production.

Please remember that this is beta software. It contains known bugs and incomplete functionality. We do not recommend running beta software in a production environment, and support is limited at this time to questions here on the community forums.

Add-ons and custom styles may be broken after upgrading to 2.3. You must test your add-ons thoroughly or look for updates. Be especially careful with add-ons that cover similar features to ones that are added to 2.3; these may conflict with the core XenForo data. If data conflicts are found, they will need to be resolved in a new add-on release or by removing the add-on before upgrading to 2.3.

If you choose to run beta software, it is your responsibility to ensure that you make a backup of your data. We recommend you do this before attempting an upgrade. If in doubt, always do a test upgrade on a copy of your production data.

All customers with active licenses may now download the new version from the customer area.

Download XenForo 2.3.0 Beta 6​

From the licensed customer area​

Alongside the release of XenForo 2.3.0 Beta 6, we are also releasing updated versions of each of our official add-ons:

• XenForo Media Gallery 2.3.0 Beta 6
• XenForo Resource Manager 2.3.0 Beta 6
• XenForo Enhanced Search 2.3.0 Beta 6

Customers with active licenses for these add-ons may download the new versions from their customer area.

Download official add-ons​

From the licensed customer area​

Requirements​

The following are minimum requirements:

• PHP 7.2 or newer
• MySQL 5.7 and newer
• All of the add-ons listed here require XenForo 2.3.
• Enhanced Search requires at least Elasticsearch 7.2

Note: Only the PHP version requirements have changed here. However, even if you're running PHP 7.2 we strongly recommend upgrading to PHP 8.3 at the earliest opportunity for improvements in speed, security and stability. We also recommend MySQL 8.0 (or equivalent).

Installation and upgrade instructions​

Full details for how to install and upgrade XenForo can be found in the XenForo manual. One-click upgrades from XF 2.2 are possible, but you must uncheck the "Only check for stable upgrades" option in Options > Basic board information. Once the XF 2.3 upgrade has been complete, the official add-ons should be upgraded as well.

Please remember that this is beta/preview software. It contains known bugs and incomplete functionality. We do not recommend or support running beta software in a production environment. Support for beta releases is limited to questions here on the community forums.