The first major update to Social Groups is finally here
The biggest feature added is
XenForo Media Gallery Integration. With the appropriate permissions, group members can either link an existing album they own, or create a brand new one, directly from within their social groups. The URLs of the albums/media items will also reflect what group the albums/media items are in.
The other really notable feature is
Virtual Category. By adding a new node with the "Social group list" node type, a list is added to the forum list containing all social groups the current user is a member of, in the same style as existing forums. This can really help make the social groups feel like a part of your forum!
You can now also search for social groups themselves, rather than just topics within them. Great for discoverability.
Social group owners and supervisors with the appropriate permissions can now also add "Related threads" to their group. These threads are shown in a new widget on the Group Overview page, and links to existing threads in normal forums that the group staff believe are relevant to this social group.
Speaking of widgets, most panels on the "Group Overview" page have been converted to Wigets, and can therefore be re-ordered in the Appearance -> Widgets page in the AdminCP. Of course, this also means they can be outright
removed as well, if you don't want to use f.ex. the "Latest messages" widget.
Messages posted in social groups now count towards the user's total message count. If you don't want this, you can disable it in the XenForo Options for this add-on. You can optionally only disable message counts for certain group types such as Private or Hidden groups, or tick all the boxes to disable message counts for
all group types.
There are a bunch of other smaller features and changes, please see the changelog for the full list.