Best Of

Good afternoon, folks!

I wanted to jump in and provide some context here and answer your questions.

First, @Marco — you asked if there’s a list of things that do not work with Custom Post Pages at this time. The answer is yes. I’ve been keeping track of these gaps as we work through our backlog. This may not be a perfect list, so please let me know if I’ve missed anything you’ve noticed since making the change.

Current gaps with Custom Post Pages

• Badgify Comments add-on – Assign a custom badge to a specific discussion. Each user who comments in that discussion will automatically receive the badge.
• Polls add-on – Allow users to create Poll-type posts and poll the community for their opinions or thoughts on topics of interest.
• Private Discussions add-on – Give a restricted view of discussions by hiding the comment thread behind a “register/sign in” call-to-action. Also includes the ability to limit how much of a discussion is displayed to restricted users and control whether embedded images and videos display.
• “#latest” behavior – Jump directly to the newest comments in a thread you’ve already viewed.

Why these didn’t make the first cut

When we rebuilt post pages with Layout Editor, it was a major initiative. These pages had to be redesigned from the ground up, and that meant making some tough prioritization choices.

To decide what shipped first, we reviewed feature usage across all communities:

• Features and add-ons that were enabled in fewer communities were scheduled later in the rollout. Unfortunately, that meant Badgify Comments and Polls didn’t make the first cut.
• For Private Discussions, much of its functionality is already handled by Layout Editor (e.g. role-based visibility, guest CTAs). What’s still missing are (1) the ability to limit how much of a discussion displays to restricted users, and (2) control over whether embedded media displays.
• The “#latest” behavior was delayed not because of usage, but because of some tricky design/implementation details. The good news: this is resolved, and it should be available in our 2025.017 release in a few weeks.

What’s next?

Most importantly, these features are not being retired — they remain on our roadmap. Even though overall usage was lower, we know that for the communities who rely on them, they’re really valuable. We’re actively working to reprioritize these gaps, and our goal is to bring them back into post pages by the end of this year if possible.

I don’t have a precise delivery date to share yet, but we are tracking this feedback closely, and I’ll keep you updated as we make progress.

It's the very specific questions for which Ai doesn't have an answer. New features and updates in the past two years that aren't as easily found in Ai. Strategies that people create with their creativity that Ai doesn't suggest.

A lot of content says: I have a very specific problem. I need to find someone who has solved this and been successful with the solution. Then I want to learn more from them.

Ai seems to have a lot of good ideas, but not the entire source for how, why, when a change was implemented, and how it looked a year down the road.

@borme
I'll try to make this short. At my previous company using Vanilla, we did all our product beta testing using Categories. We were testing physical products and software. We had one main Beta category that all users could see and find out about new beta testing opportunities and announcements. We had multiple sub-categories that were role restricted for our tests that were in progress. This worked out great for us and was easy to manage. We would then archive the category after the test was over and delete the roles for that particular beta to keep things clean. Just my 2 cents.

Brett