XenForo 1.0.0 Beta 6 Released

After a somewhat longer than usual period since the last beta release, we are now ready to present XenForo 1.0.0 Beta 6. This release contains the usual assortment of bug fixes, but also introduces some new functionality that will provide greater flexibility of features and an improved user experience.

All licensed customers may now download the new version from the customer area.

This is Beta Software

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.

If you choose to run beta software, it is your responsibility to ensure that you make a backup of your data.

Notable Changes

Rather than squeezing all the interesting new bits in Beta 6 into this post, we will list some highlights after the installation and upgrade instructions below.

 

Installation Instructions

If you are installing XenForo for the first time, please ensure that you do not download the upgrade package from the customer area.

To install XenForo, you will need to extract the zip and upload all the files from the contained upload directory onto your web server. You may upload into your web root, or any folder within the web root. This shall be referred to as your XenForo Directory.

Having uploaded the necessary files, you should direct your web browser to the URL that corresponds to your XenForo Directory and add '/install' to the address (eg:http://www.example.com/xenforo/install). This will trigger the installation process, which will guide you through the necessary steps to get a working XenForo installation running on your server.

Please note that the installation routine will direct you to ensure that the data and internal_data directories within your XenForo Directory are writeable by the webserver (ie: chmod 0777).

 

Upgrade Instructions

If you are planning on upgrading, please ensure that you download the upgrade package from the customer area.

To upgrade an existing XenForo installation, you will need to extract the zip and upload all files within the upload directory to your existing XenForo Directory, overwriting all files.

Note that you should ensure that the data and internal_data directories remain writable by the webserver (ie: chmod 0777). In most cases, they should remain writable and you should not need to take action.

Once the files are uploaded, your XenForo installation will automatically be closed until the upgrade is complete. To begin the upgrade, go to the URL that corresponds to <your XenForo Directory>/install (eg: http://www.example.com/xenforo/install). You will be instructed to login as an administrator and guided through the steps. Once the upgrade is complete, your XenForo installation will automatically be reopened.

 

Lightbox

New to Beta 6 is the image viewing lightbox. Clicking any attached image thumbnail will open the lightbox, which provides a clean, uninterrupted background against which images can be viewed at their best.



Navigational controls are provided to allow you to view any images attached (using

 

Feeder

XenForo now has the ability to automatically consume news feeds from a variety of sources including various flavours of RSS and Atom.



The feeder can operate at admin-defined intervals and import content from feeds into new threads in the forum of your choice.

Content can be posted as a guest, fetching user information from the feed, which allows you to import a feed without having to create a user specifically to act as the author of the created threads.

You have complete control over the formatting and structure of both the title and message content of the imported threads through the optional use of title and message templates, which can be configured on a per-feed basis.

 

Question and Answer CAPTCHA

Adding to the armoury of tools in the war against spam, XenForo now supports a question-and-answer CAPTCHA system, allowing you to define a number of questions that pose no problems for humans to answer, but require significant effort for robots to decipher and respond.


Questions may have any number of answers, in order to assist people to respond correctly when multiple responses are acceptable. Questions can be easily defined from the question editor without ever having to reload the page to add additional acceptable answers.



Question and Answer CAPTCHA can be enabled from the XenForo options manager.

 

Inline Message Editor

It is no longer necessary to load a new page in order to edit message in XenForo. Our overlay framework now supports the full WYSIWYG editor, allowing you to make rich edits to your messages quickly and easily without ever leaving the dicussion page.

A More Options... control is provided to allow you to access the full editor, should you need to attach files to the message etc.



The inline message editor uses an extensible framework, so it can be deployed across different content types with ease. It already supports editing messages in personal conversations.​

 

More...

Login Bar

The layout and animation of the login bar has been improved.​

User Permissions

New permissions exist to deny users the ability to use the Like system.​

Date Formatting

It is now possible to fetch specific, absolute date elements in templates using the {xen:date} and {xen:time} functions. For example, if you want to output just the year for a given date variable, you can use {xen:date $dateVariable, 'Y'}.​

Disable WYSIWYG

Users may now disable the WYSIWYG editor completely via their Preferences if they choose to do so.​

Improved WYSIWYG Smilie Menu

The drop-down smilie menu in the message editor has been improved to better support larger numbers of smilies.​

Forum Options

It is now possible to force all new posts in a forum to the moderation queue, and to disable posting in a forum completely.​

Language Locales

XenForo now supports specific language locales (en-US etc.), allowing Facebook content to be displayed in the language of your forum.​

 

The best release so far from them, gotta love XF.

 

Yep, I suggest you buy it if you havent already.

 

About time they add Q&A CAPTCHA.

 

Yea I know, it was very much needed.