Today, we have taken a major step forward in the move to make XenForo 2 our primary, stable and supported platform. While we have run a
XenForo 2 demo since November, the main community site has remained on XenForo 1.x during development. After ten public developer previews, we now consider XF2 to be ready for further duties, and therefore we have upgraded our own forums.
XenForo 2 represents a significant technological advancement over XenForo 1. The entire software architecture has been rewritten for enhanced efficiency, stability and speed of development. Systems such as XF2's entities provide for easy, rapid, error-proof fetching and manipulation of data, allowing new features and add-ons to be developed with hitherto unseen speed and reliability
(1),
(2).
User-facing features have now gone beyond parity with XenForo 1, and new enhancements such as
Quick Thread and Thread Prompts, the What's New system and
enhanced media embedding, along with
many other changes, offer end-users new opportunities for engagement, interaction and discovery.
XenForo 2.0.0 Developer Preview 10 remains available to download, and will continue to be available until the next release, which we expect to be our first public beta. Upgrading XenForo.com to XF2 has been a major test of the upgrade system, and so the forthcoming beta will be customers' first opportunity to experiment with test upgrades of their own forum installations (the upgrade system is unavailable in Developer Preview releases).
For now, please continue to offer feedback and suggestions in the usual manner. We have opened a
collection of new forums specifically for XenForo 2 bug reports etc., and we will be adding new thread prefixes that you can use to identify your threads as XF2-related.
Please note that although XenForo 2 is essentially feature-locked, in order that we can progress as quickly as possible through beta testing and on to a stable, supported release, we are of course actively soliciting suggestions and feedback for XenForo 2.1 and beyond, for which we already have big plans - we are very excited to continue building new and exciting features on the new framework, and we are greatly looking forward to seeing what the add-on community comes up with.
