XF 2.3 Featuring content

While the first few 'Have you seen...?' posts for XenForo 2.3 have focused on mostly aesthetic or performance changes, today we are taking the opportunity to talk about one of the first new major pieces of functionality we've been working on. Every release cycle we like to focus on at least one significant feature related to content discovery and 2.3 is no different with the introduction of what we are calling Featured content.

"But wait, don't we already have featured resources?"

Indeed we do but the ability to feature resources is now joined by threads, media items, and practically any content type you fine developers out there add support for or, naturally, content types we may add ourselves in the future.

Let's take a look at the process of featuring a thread!

The first question I expect some of you will have is "am I able to automatically feature threads?". And the answer is, yes! When editing any forum, under the "Advanced options" for each forum, there is now a new checkbox that enables you to do just that:

If you have a forum that acts somewhat as a latest news/article style forum, having the ability to automatically feature all threads created in that forum will enable you to more easily showcase important threads to your members.

Similar settings can be found in resource categories and media categories:

You can, of course, be much more selective about which content you would like to feature. But, first, let's look at the permissions surrounding that.

As you might expect, these permissions can be granted on a per-node/category basis as well, allowing you to delegate the featuring permissions to any moderator in control of any forum.

When a moderator is granted permission to feature content, they will find the link to do that typically in the "More options..." menu along with other moderation related options:

You will then be presented with a confirmation overlay. At this point, featuring the content really is as simple as clicking "Feature":

But, before it is featured, you might want to make a few changes. Clicking "Customize" will expand the overlay to reveal a few more options:

While these options are automatically inferred from the content when featuring by default, you can, if you wish, choose a different title, a custom snippet and even upload a custom cover image for the featured item.

If you need to make changes to any of these settings at any time, you can do so by following the same process as when you added the featured content, this time by clicking the "Manage feature" option in the "More options..." menu.

From here you can modify the title, snippet or feature image at any time. You can, of course, also unfeature the content too.

Content is ordered by the date each item was featured. In order to fine tune the ordering, you can simply modify the featured date.

In terms of displaying featured content, there is a number of options available. The most prevalent and default view of featured content is via a new tab on the "What's new" pages.

This is formatted very similarly to the "preview" style of the article forums, displaying a prominent title and image.

The list can also be filtered by specific content types:

The other methods of displaying featured content is, of course, done via widgets. So let's take a look at the new "Featured content" widget:

When adding a widget in the usual way, these are the options you are presented with. Pictured above are the typical settings for displaying featured resources in a carousel as we do in XFRM 2.2 on the resource overview page.

The options surrounding "context" here mean that widgets can use page context that is available in some widget positions in order to filter the results. For example, if you add the widget to a forum or thread related widget position, with the context options enabled in the widget you will only see featured threads in that specific forum.

The display styles should be very familiar at this point as they mirror similar settings for other widgets. But here's a visual overview:

Simple​

Perfect for smaller spaces, such as sidebars:

Standard​

Best suited for wider spaces, and would be perfect for use on a page node or similar to make your own portal style page:

Carousel​

This is display which is best used to showcase a number of items of content in a relatively small space, it automatically cycles through the content making it a little more visually striking:

That's all for this week! Please tell us below how you'll be using Featured content when you upgrade to XenForo 2.3 in the near future.

Unfortunately, there's no tl;dr video this week due to a little bit of an incident at @Kier HQ.

Stay tuned for next week where we'll be showcasing even more new functionality coming soon in XenForo 2.3.

 

[ge66]

I would like to know if there is an easy way to disable this feature completely or if I have to remove it from some templates like whats-new?
No permission and disable under navigation I have seen.

 

[ge66]

Earlier I used:

DL6 - [Widget] Popular threads and posts

Oct 7, 2017

Adds 4 new widgets that show the most liked, viewed and replied threads

• DL6
• most liked post most liked threads widget xenforo 2
• Add-ons [2.x]

For showing popular threads in some forums from the last couple of days.

Now I use some parts of this for the same:

D.C Style - Widgets

Sep 14, 2020

Add widgets with full functionality needed.

• D.C Style
• widget
• Add-ons [2.x]

For me it works well and is automatic. I use a couple of variants of the widget to entice people to get to different parts of my forum via active and popular threads from my home page.

 

[Mouth]

I would like to know if there is an easy way to disable this feature completely or if I have to remove it from some templates like whats-new?
No permission and disable under navigation I have seen.

I concur with the question/requirement. Whilst terrific functionality, the administration overhead will outweigh the advantages. Without criteria and auto-unfeature, I suspect it will only be able to be used by low traffic sites.

Thread 'Automatic Content Featuring With Criteria'

Oct 3, 2023

This is related to the latest HYS, I looked through the thread and it seems multiple people want this. If this is planned, feel free to comment, or close this thread.

XF 2.3 - Featuring content

While the first few 'Have you seen...?' posts for XenForo 2.3 have focused on mostly aesthetic or performance changes, today we are taking the opportunity to talk about one of the first new major pieces of functionality we've been working on. Every release cycle we like to focus on at least one...

xenforo.com

It would certainly be very nice to be able to define criteria (maybe per-node) to automatically Feature and Unfeature a thread or similar with the greatly expanded functionality. Some sample uses:

• Site Announcements - When an admin posts an announcement, automatically feature it for a week (or however long you choose), then unfeature it.
• Per board...

• KensonPlays
• Replies: 2
• Forum: XenForo suggestions

• 

Thread 'Automatic unfeaturing of content'

Oct 4, 2023

XF2.3 will bring automatic featuring of content. Once it is featured it will be forever unless you manually unfeature it.

I would like to suggest a few useful things to avoid a situation where you end up with a mass of featured content forever and that will give members more control over their featured content.

Unfeature date
It would be very useful if members can set the end date, so that the content will be automatically unfeatured at that date. @Paul B 's very popular Featured Threads addon had this functionality. In the interface to feature the content, you also set the...

• Alpha1
• Replies: 3
• Forum: XenForo suggestions

• 

 

[Mr Lucky]

This is display which is best used to showcase a number of items of content in a relatively small space, it automatically cycles through the content making it a little more visually striking:

Great that there is a carousel, but it really should show the image rather than a large Avatar. Or at least have a choice.

Most of the featured content I want are articles written by me, and it just doesn't look right having all the images the same Avatar. As a portal especially it would be so much better with images drawn from the content.