Style updates Important changes regarding the 2.2 style releases

Hello everyone!

I just wanted to touch base with you all in regards to some upcoming changes on the official 2.2 style releases. In our 2.1.8 style announcement, a big goal was to clean up some templates to avoid add-on conflicts. With the 2.2 releases, the main goal is to reduce the number of the template edits we've done to help future conflicts on updates. As much as I love creating styles and helping communities out, one thing I do not like seeing is outdated templates. You can find out a little more about outdated templates here.

To clean up the templates, certain functionality in the styles must be adjusted or removed. For instance, I was able to remove edits for four templates by removing these two options alone:
  • "Node helpers" was an option that displayed the node IDs and CSS for a custom icon. While this was a nifty feature, it also caused an edit in four different templates. With XenForo adding these new various node types, I can only imagine that these templates will potentially be changing often.
  • "Avatar column" was an option that allowed you to replace the default avatars when viewing the thread list with an icon, icon with reply count, or remove it entirely. Again, with XenForo adding the new node types, this is another template that I see changing constantly. I'll post directions on how to replicate this, but from what I see this option was rarely used.
Just to get you an idea, in an earlier release of the 2.1 series, we had around 15 default XenForo templates edited. With the 2.2 release, we're looking at only 4 total default templates edited! This doesn't mean you'll never see that dreaded "There are templates that may be outdated. Click here to review them." message, but it should help tremendously.

For the few features that are removed, I will provide instructions on how to re-apply them if you use them. Thank you, everyone, I believe this will be a huge step forward in making upgrades easier on everyone.
 
Other than the templates issue, are there a lot of changes that need to be made for 2.2?

I won't upgrade to 2.2 until the release version and obviously not until I can transfer the Pixel Exit styles. Do you expect the PE styles to be ready in time for the 2.2 release version? Or alternatively do you know whether the 2.1 versions will work on 2.2?
 
Other than the templates issue, are there a lot of changes that need to be made for 2.2?

I won't upgrade to 2.2 until the release version and obviously not until I can transfer the Pixel Exit styles. Do you expect the PE styles to be ready in time for the 2.2 release version? Or alternatively do you know whether the 2.1 versions will work on 2.2?

2.2 really wasn't that big of a change in the templates in comparison to past versions of XF. The two big changes are from the templates "post_macros" and "thread_list_macros". If you have these customized then it may be best to copy your edit, revert and re-apply when you do the actual upgrade.

In the downloads area here under your license, I did release a "beta 1" version for the 2.2 styles just so folks could dive in and test things out. As the next 3 betas rolled out, it did popup with some oddball outdated templates but the beta 1 works just fine for now.

On the front-end of things, my goal is to try for minimal changes there so ideally, your users won't see any real differences. This isn't like the update from the 2.0 series to the 2.1 where the new Font Awesome broke every page upon upgrading. You could technically run our 2.1.10 on 2.2 without any visible errors (but the new 2.2 functionality would not be there).

The goal is to push out the updates for 2.2 the day XF releases it.
 
No large plans for the email templates aside from running through making sure they look nice on the styles. I'm open to ideas but I'm not sure what sort of things I could code in using HTML/CSS edits to modify the emails that would be beneficial for everyone.
 
I'm open to ideas
  • Get ride of the background colour/shade (grey in xF default)
  • Remove un-necessary spacing between blocks. Eg. Latest threads section puts each thread in a seperate block
  • Remove un-necessary meta data. Eg. author, date/time, no. of replies, forum name/hyperling
  • Remove useless Read More 'button' in bottom right of thread. Thread title is already hyperlinked.
It's the content - title and body - that's important here and will get users back to the site. The ugly-as-sin spacing, meta data, and that read-more button hanging out there all by itself are all a detraction and a complete waste of space.
 
Beta 5 just released, and it's pretty stable tbh. Looks like it's safe to assume that 2.2 will go gold at the end of this month.
 
  • Get ride of the background colour/shade (grey in xF default)
  • Remove un-necessary spacing between blocks. Eg. Latest threads section puts each thread in a seperate block
  • Remove un-necessary meta data. Eg. author, date/time, no. of replies, forum name/hyperling
  • Remove useless Read More 'button' in bottom right of thread. Thread title is already hyperlinked.
It's the content - title and body - that's important here and will get users back to the site. The ugly-as-sin spacing, meta data, and that read-more button hanging out there all by itself are all a detraction and a complete waste of space.

This sort of stuff really seems best served as custom edits on a per-site basis. It's one of the things where if I were to remove the call-to-action button (read more), I'd get complaints asking for it to be back. Email templates intrigue me though so maybe once the 2.2 storm settles down I can look into posting up an RM about custom email templates.

Beta 5 just released, and it's pretty stable tbh. Looks like it's safe to assume that 2.2 will go gold at the end of this month.

About to pull the trigger on my own site! :). I think we're very close, we might see some more updates to Media Gallery and the RM before the stable release, not sure.
 

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