XFtoWP 1.6 brings enhanced syncing capabilities with Webhooks integration

Thanks to the long-awaited release of XenForo 2.3, which unleashes a powerful technology called Webhooks, your websites are now open to a new communication channel that unlocks powerful new syncing capabilities.

XFtoWP 1.6 now listens for approved Webhooks sent by your forum and allows your WordPress site to instantly know when specified actions take place on your forum.

This is a critically important detail as XFtoWP has only ever really been able to perform based on actions that happened from your WordPress site, and XFtoWP 1.6 finally throws that limitation right into the gutter!

Now with Webhooks, your WordPress website will know when things like user registration, new profile posts, new user upgrades, new threads, and many other actions happen, exactly as they happen.

Let’s take a tour of what’s new in XFtoWP 1.6 and what the new Webhooks integrations has brought to your admin panel.

Understanding How Webhooks Interact with your WordPress Website

First, it can be helpful to know just what Webhooks are and how they interact across your websites before using this new functionality. It may feel like magic sometimes, but the underlying concepts are simple.

So, what are Webhooks? This quote from the Have you seen..? article at XenForo by developer Chris Deeming sums it up nicely:

For those of you who haven’t heard of webhooks before, they are a powerful utility that allow one application or service to send information to another when certain events occur. These can be everyday actions such as when making a payment for access to a product or service, or more specific implementations such as having a new Thread from your forum posted to Discord automatically.

After you setup a Webhook from XenForo, your forum will now send a “message” to a specified page at a destination URL with data about the action that just occurred.

Technically, you can make your forum send a Webhook to any website but it is up to the website receiving the message to “capture” it, analyze it, and take actions from there.

This is the part where XFtoWP 1.6 steps in and captures the raw messages sent from XenForo, processes them, logs them, and determines which actions to take on your WordPress website.

All it takes for your WordPress website to open that line of communication is to match a couple of simple settings from your XenForo forum, which we will look at shortly in this article.

With that simple understanding in mind, let’s take a look at the new features of XFtoWP 1.6.

See the latest received Webhooks from your WordPress admin panel

One of the first thing you will notice after upgrading to XFtoWP 1.6 is the new Webhooks panel which logs any received Webhooks and shows you a glimpse of their data:

For the introduction of XFtoWP 1.6 and its new logs systems, most of the potential of Webhooks has not even been cracked open yet. The data you see in the Logs don’t do anything by themselves, but shows you when actions happen.

The XFtoWP 1.6.x series will be dedicated to enhancing the current features of the plugin with Webhooks data, as well as introducing new features based on these actions.

While more core features get developed, you already have access to powerful new developer tools that allow you to hook into Webhooks on your own to inject your own custom logic during any action.

Combined that with XFtoWP’s already rich developer library and you have the potential to finally create the XenForo-WordPress integration of your dreams.

While XFtoWP 1.6 mainly focuses on setting up the potential of Webhooks, there is one notable new feature that has already been added thanks to this new technology…

The first Webhook action: register a WordPress user after registering from XenForo

By far one of the biggest wishes of XFtoWP customers is to use XenForo as the source of registration. As explained before, this was originally limited because most actions could only be run from WordPress.

But in the freshly designed XFtoWP 1.6 admin panel you will find the first XenForo syncing capability in Settings > User Syncing > XenForo:

A dedicated tutorial will be written about using this functionality, but it is overall pretty straightforward to setup and should also be used with the Settings > User Syncing > WordPress > Login with XenForo user credentials setting.

Redesigned Admin Panel

As mentioned above, the layout of the XFtoWP admin panel has been reorganized to hold the new Webhooks setup and data panels, as well as shaped to hold future enhancements thanks to this new technology.

You can find the initial4 setup process in Settings > Site Setup > Webhooks.

Saves more user data on sync

XFtoWP 1.6 makes an important enhancement to user data that is saved to a WordPress user’s profile.

Now any time a user is synced they will get more data like the URL of their XenForo avatar, profile banner, trophy points, message count, and more saved right to their WordPress profile for usage in widgets and other areas.

You can access this new data from any user by entering their user ID into the xf_usermeta function:

xf_user_meta( 456, 'xf_profile' );

Result:

Tip: the next time a user is synced or refreshed they will have this extra profile information saved to their WordPress user.

You can run the Refresh users bulk action to cycle through all connected users, or manually refresh users by going to WP admin > Users > (select user) > Sync user

Plugin Files Re-organized for easier learning and extensibility

This is one for developer’s, but I find it is also important for every customer to know the care that goes into the quality of the written code to ensure XFtoWP can always be scaled up and reused by anybody.

Many of the core plugin files have been reorganized to be easier to find and hidden behind less folder structures.

My hope for anyone who reads the source code of XFtoWP is to be able to dig in and find the part of the functionality you want to as fast and as intuitively as possible.

Some of the most important raw configuration data has also been consolidated into a single filters file, and if you know how to use WordPress filters you can overwrite and extend some pretty important aspects of the plugin with ease.

Finally, the destination folder of the CSS and JS files have changed, so please update these URLs if you by chance have pasted them into caching plugin for exemption, or other purposes.

The old CSS/JS destination:

https://domain.com/wp-content/plugins/XFWP/lib/css/*
https://domain.com/wp-content/plugins/XFWP/lib/js/*

The new CSS/JS destination:

https://domain.com/wp-content/plugins/XFWP/css/*
https://domain.com/wp-content/plugins/XFWP/js/*

XFtoWP 1.6 Beta 1 is Available from Your Account Area

As of this initial article, XFtoWP 1.6 is still in Beta and publicly available for download if you wish to test it on your staging websites.

While most of the functionality of XFtoWP 1.6 is complete, there are still a couple of minor missing features and interface changes that still to be made. It is strongly recommended you do not run beta software in production.

To read the full changelog, click here. To download XFtoWP 1.6 Beta from your account, click here, and find it under “Bonus Downloads”.