XenForo Limited informed its customers today of their one year anniversary, and announced that they're celebrating it by introducing the first public beta of version 1.1.
"Today marks one year since the sale of the first XenForo license, back onOctober 5th 2010. In the interim, we brought the software to its 1.0.0 stable release in March, and after that our attention switched to gathering the vast amount of feedback from customers and visitors to XenForo.com.", Kier Darby
The vast amount of feedback, suggestions, bug reports and open discussions with the customers has resulted in version 1.1. This is not just a simple maintenance release, this is a feature-rich upgrade with more than a few hand full of new features, improvements and tweaks.
The last few months news about 1.1 being around the corner came to light. We've had our own open discussion here on XenFans: XenForo 1.1 Around the Corner and a handful of new features and improvements have been demonstrated in new 'Have You Seen' (HYS) videos, including custom user fields, notices, search improvements,thread prefixes and thread prefix management, BB code media improvements and surely even more to come.
So what does version 1.1 mean to XenForo Limited?
"1.1 to XFL demonstrates our rapid development cycle, our continuing commitment to the highest quality possible in web software, and to delivering features that our customers want", Kier Darby.
And what does version 1.1 mean to XenForo customers?
"1.1 to customers means a new array of features to make the job of administering a XenForo forum even easier and removes many of the previous barriers to adoption that may have existed", Kier Darby.
What is the importance of this beta?
"As always with a beta release, [...] The release is unsupported, and is made for the purpose of testing, soliciting feedback, and to assist add-on and style developers with their work to ensure that their products are compatible with the new version", Kier Darby.
And what's new to version 1.1?
Besides the HYS videos which are definitely worth seeing, here's a list:
- Right to left language support
- Thread prefixes, including prefix use permissions and quick management systems
- A warning system that allows you to limit the access and permissions of troublemakers
- The ability for your users to ignore the content of other users
- Custom user profile fields, with the ability to display specific ones with messages
- Daily statistics tracking of a number of different elements
- Admin CP search to make it easier to find your way around the control panel
- Admin logging (include a full log of all request data in POST requests, kept for a definable length of time)
- Moderator action logging
- Thread viewing permissions to limit a user's access to just thread titles or just their own threads
- User group promotions
- Notices at the top of pages
- Greatly expanded criteria system for use with trophies, user group promotions and notices
- More media embedding options and support for a larger range of sites
- Option to auto-embed media objects such as videos
- An attachment browser / manager for admins
- The ability to attach files to conversation messages
- The ability to search within threads
- General interface improvements, simplifications, and tweaks
- Performance improvements including use of CSS sprites, smilies as sprites,minified CSS, and minified JavaScript
Before you decide to upgrade or install any new version, we strongly recommend to not run this on your live web site, but if you decide to do so: back up .. everything.
Installation and upgrade instructions are the same as always, however, if you desire XenFans to install or upgrade your 1.0 board to 1.1: We can assist you for a fee. Just contact us.
XenFans.com itself will be testing with upgrades, our team will beta test the 1.1 release, and when we're comfortable with the new version during the beta period we will update the site. Additionally we will do our best to update our add-ons and styles to work properly on 1.1.
We at XenFans.com want to congratulate XenForo Limited (Ashley, Kier, Mike) on their anniversary of version 1, and the release of version 1.1. Best of luck with 1.1 and beyond. Cheers.
I've tested it on my localhost account already 
