Have you upgraded to Xenforo 2.3 yet?

[Shortie]

I am seeing many communities upgrade their sites to the latest version of Xenforo which is 2.3 but some people are still holding back due to add-ons not being updated yet for the forum that they use which would mean they would use features they offer or it would cause a lot of issues at the backend.

We recently updated one forum that I co-own with my other half to 2.3 and as much as we have lost some features due to add-ons not being updated yet, these were features that were not used as much as we hoped so it is not a loss at the moment.

Have you upgraded to Xenforo 2.3 yet?

 

[Tracy]

No, and I still have a few major add-ons that have not bee updated to be 2.3 compatible.
Then you add on top of that the continued number of bugs that are being reported I'll be waiting until at least 2.3.5'ish or so to even think of upgrading - that is if the add-ons i require are even 2.3 compatible by then.
It is rather telling that as long as 2.3 was in BETA/RC status, and now released that there are still as many paid add-ons that have not been brought up to 2.3 compatibility yet. Some of that is because the developers have several large complicated add-ons and it takes time. One of my core required ones is ElasticSearch Essentials, but the developer has a lot of other add-ons to update also. But some of the others that have smaller add-ons (again, paid) you would think they would have been faster to the release of for 2.3 compatibility. It is one of the hazards of running a script that can become so dependent upon 3rd party developers.
I have to wonder if some of those developers are "scared" that 3.0 will be dropping soon and that they will have to do everything all over again so they are just pushing a 2.3 update of their add-on off?
I have to wonder if the fact the slow adoption of 2.3 and the promise of the upcoming 3.0 version may also be affecting their renewal rate.

 

[Carlos]

I have. And I'm not worried about plugins. Some plugins do work despite the incompatibility.

But that's not to say I don't have issues with 2.3. At first, when I heard about variations, I was ecstatic. Because in my mind, it would have eliminated the whole parent skin vs child skin idea.

My biggest issue with variations is that even if you have the skin in two variations, ONE edit you make in the main variation will affect or effect the other one. I'm not joking. I already tried tinkering with variations as soon as I got "Core" (It's a name of a skin) installed on xenForo 2.3. So, you edit one part of the skin, it affects the other.

Previously, my "Core" skin looked like this:

The skin looks sophisticated. It's almost like a coder designed it. Bzz. Nope. I edited everything by hand, and asked questions. With 2.3, I got everything the way I wanted, yeah... but variations isn't so customizable at first. So when I tried adding opacity to the wrapper as you see above. As I do, light's opacity went fine. No problem. Until you switch to "dark" variation. Dark variation also had the white/white opacity! I got irritated, annoyed. So, I go back to the designer of "core" and asked how to fix the issue at hand. Turns out I had to use CSS for the other variation!

Once I got this problem sorted. I went to another wall: I want Dark to be the main visual page of my site. There's no option to. And xenforo says they won't fix this problem!

Their reasoning was echo'ed by Brogan, and bled throughout the xenForo team like a mindvirus. Either that, or they're setting this up for xF3.

The idea of making a skin correlated to an OS "theme" is a neat innovation, and is probably inspired by a website called Umbrella Online. In one of their skins, they designed it so that when you view the site at a certain point of the day - it would change the skin. So, morning or afternoon? Light. Night? Dark. Nice innovation.

Problem: Some people like light, some people like dark. I have a market of gamers, so naturally, as you land on any one of my gaming sites, you'd expect to see a dark skin. There will be some exceptions - like PS5Forum, since it has this white/black combo.

xenForo's staff is pushing back saying "why would you force it on your visitors.?" FIRE BROGAN, OH MY GOOD LORD!

 

[Tracy]

Problem: Some people like light, some people like dark. I have a market of gamers, so naturally, as you land on any one of my gaming sites, you'd expect to see a dark skin. There will be some exceptions - like PS5Forum, since it has this white/black combo.

It is really not a problem. You just keep two different styles that are selectable by the user and then have a third style that uses the system settings. Make either the dark or light as default and then the system setting as a user selectable option.
Nothing says you HAVE to use it.
On my astrophotography site I'll continue to do this as one of the optional styles is a "night time" style that is primarily red and black so that it does not affect your night vision as much and the default is a dark one.
My issue continues to be the number of bugs that are cropping up in this release. I honestly don't remember any release with this steady stream of reported bugs, even when 2.0 was released, which was a major revision.

xenForo's staff is pushing back saying "why would you force it on your visitors.?

This is honestly rather rich coming from them if that is so. They offer (force) barely stubbed out options that to get it to work you have to obtain 3rd party add-ons to make it truly useful in many instances. But that is their design paradigm. Offer their license holders the bare bones minimum and if you want more find a 3rd party add-on that is already existent or pay to have one coded.

 

[Tracy]

Six months since the BETA release, 3 months since the official release... and I'm still waiting.

Currently I have several Xenforo add-ons that I am STILL waiting on (after 6 months since the first BETA) to get updated so that I can even think about upgrading. Those add-ons are pretty much core requirement for my site. Several of them are paid add-ons.
You would think, with the overt dependency that XenForo has on 3rd party developers to make their script what it, IMHO, should have been originally that there would be a rush to make sure that the 3rd party developers would get their add-ons compliant.
As I mentioned, several of mine are paid add-ons.. and 6 months down the line (from the BETA and around 3 months from official release) I am STILL waiting on those add-ons to get updated.
Are the developers waiting until 3.0 is released before they update? Who knows?
All I now is that I STILL am sitting on 2.2 (which, BTW is working fine generally except for the suck-ass editor but that is not even fixed in 2.3) and rocking along.
This small matter shows the inadequacy of the dependence on 3rd party developers to extend the core XenForo script to what many need and request, especially when you consider that several of my 3rd party add-ons enhance the simplistic stubs that XenForo offers unto a more quantitative offering.
I have to wonder how badly the dependency on 3rd party add-ons and their not being timely updated is impacting the uptake of the latest version. And is this failure to have the 3rd party add-ons updated in a timely manner negatively impacting the license renewal rate? I know that currently, if i knew then what I know now I would NOT have paid the several hundred dollars I did to keep my licenses current.. seeing as how I currently cannot gain any use of the new versions. It would have financially been smarter to NOT renew when I did.
Basically I threw away around $750 that I did not need to spend.
I wonder how many others actually recognized that and did not renew since the current offering did not bring anything major to the table?

And it's honestly probably a good thing that I'm posting banned over on their support site.... because I'd be castigating them with high heat about the issue... and we all know that certain of their developers (especially Chris and several of their cult members) cannot stand being called out on any perceived weakness of the script itself and its dependence on 3rd parties to offer what many consider basic core ability.

 

[Bob]

Have you upgraded to Xenforo 2.3 yet?

Yes, all of my personal sites and all of my support sites are running XF 2.3.

Note: My largest site has 1.2 million members, 5.7 million threads, and 27 million posts. It runs on Core XF, XFES, Shoutbox by Siropu, Sportsbook, Pickem and Power Rankings (the 3 sports addons I developed for myself and sell license for others to use as well).

 

[joelr]

Yes, all of my personal sites and all of my support sites are running XF 2.3.

Note: My largest site has 1.2 million members, 5.7 million threads, and 27 million posts. It runs on Core XF, XFES, Shoutbox by Siropu, Sportsbook, Pickem and Power Rankings (the 3 sports addons I developed for myself and sell license for others to use as well).

You are fortunate (and talented!) to control your own development of mods. For other clients, however, we are dependent on the devs to update in a timely manner.

 

[Baw$e]

I'm still running Xenforo 2.2. I'm waiting for 2.4 before upgrading.

 

[cpvr]

Yes, we recently upgrade my forum to 2.3. Most of our add ons were compatible as well.

 

[zoldos]

I'm still running Xenforo 2.2. I'm waiting for 2.4 before upgrading.

2.2 for me as well!

 

[zoldos]

Yes, we recently upgrade my forum to 2.3. Most of our add ons were compatible as well.

 

[Heatman]

I'm still running Xenforo 2.2. I'm waiting for 2.4 before upgrading.

I've been on your forum recently and it looks very good still running on Xenforo 2.2. I will be waiting to see how it looks running on 2.4 when you upgrade.

 

[Tracy]

Got around to setting up a dev site to play with updating my 2.2.16 to 2.3.4 in preparation for the 2.4 update that hopefully will be coming out in the next few months. Overall, a very simple upgrade if you have been exposed to it before.
There were quite a few add-ons that were still not supported and even with having the add-ons and style updated still were some template merges.
But overall, a very easy upgrade. Pretty much all of my 2.2.16 CSS customizations carried over. This has pretty much been consistent with all my XenForo upgrades and is an area that they really excel in.
I have read of some horror stories for people trying to upgrade.
The biggest things to remember:

1. Back up your full site including your database
2. Disable all your add-ons before starting the upgrade
3. Disable 2FA in the config.php if you use it
4. Upgrade your theme if you use a custom one
5. Check to make sure there are no templates waiting to be merged
6. Once you have ran the upgrade process then update any add-ons that need to be - they will auto-enable once they are upgraded.
7. Enable your other add-ons one at a time, visit your site and check your ACP for any apparent errors

The biggest fun I am having right now is addressing quirks in the system theme specific colors for the light version of the style.

 

[Aragon Burner]

I started a fresh community in November and started with 2.3 as opposed to 2.2 which i had ran on my previous community. My themes which come from the same designer as this theme on admin junkies, updated all his themes to be 2.3 compliant so I had no issues running 2.3. As for the add ons... I haven't found 1 I needed that isn't 2.3 ready. And I use a lot of add ons lol

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I've upgraded all my XenForo communities to the latest version.

I make sure I use themes and plugins that are routinely updated so that I can keep the software up to date. I also try to use very few plugins if I can help it.

No dis to plugin makers here but when you rely on a third-party plugin, sometimes the creator will retire, die, or just stop creating them. If no one takes them over, you're left with a feature that no longer gets important updates. That can lead to security problems without you even knowing it.

I try to not to add any plugin that I have to rely on.

I try only adding ones I absolutely need but with the intent to be able to leave them behind at any given time if I need to.

For example, I have Bob's link directory plugin on AAF. It's a great plugin and Bob is a great plugin developer. But if something happened and he quit developing, I could easily uninstall it and utilize a node on my forum using prefixes to be a quick replacement for the link directory.

That's my thoughts on this.

 

[Tracy]

And my astro site is updated to 2.3.4. Took about 25 minutes to get it all done after putting the site in maintenance mode and then proceeding. Since I already had a list of all the add-ons that were good to use as installed and the ones that needed to be updated (and had those already downloaded) it went pretty quickly.
The biggest issue now is getting the style modified as I did have a dedicated dark and light and the dark was heavily customized. I used it as the base for the current style and am having to go through my extra.less and remove/modify any code I had specific to a dark style.

 

[Carlos]

I also try to keep plugins at a minimum. Yes, agreed.

 

[Tracy]

This is honestly rather rich coming from them if that is so. They offer (force) barely stubbed out options that to get it to work you have to obtain 3rd party add-ons to make it truly useful in many instances. But that is their design paradigm. Offer their license holders the bare bones minimum and if you want more find a 3rd party add-on that is already existent or pay to have one coded.

And here is a clear case of what I am speaking of. Nothing against the 3rd party developer as he is providing what people have been asking for from Xenforo for about 7 years now (and which I rag on them about)... but just for the core XF software & 1st party add-ons you are going to pay $210/$120 (cost/renewal) for being able to search custom fields in your posts, media and resource manager - while that really should be core, and apparently can be done.

Now if you have RMS, AMS, CAS or similar, add another $69.99 1st year/$40 renewal in for each one of them.

 

[Nebulous]

Xenforo is a nice software but when you factor in the cost of updates and paying for all your theme and add-on updates individually, keeping your forum up to date can cost an arm and a leg.

 

[Rey619]

Yes i have already upgraded.