Make your community feel alive from the first second

[XR] Top Stories Pro is a modern content showcase widget built for XenForo 2.3. It helps you display your most important, active, trending, or hand-picked discussions in a beautiful visual layout that instantly makes your forum look more active, more professional, and more valuable to visitors.

Instead of showing plain thread links, this add-on turns your best discussions into attractive story blocks with images, badges, author info, excerpts, stats, and responsive layouts.

If your forum has great content but visitors are not noticing it fast enough, this is the widget your homepage, forum index, category pages, and sidebars are missing.

Why your site needs this

Your best content gets more visibility
Important threads should not disappear inside normal forum lists. Top Stories Pro brings them forward in a way that feels modern, editorial, and easy to explore.

Visitors understand your community faster
New visitors can instantly see what your forum is about, what people are discussing, and which content is worth clicking.

Members stay longer
Beautiful story cards encourage browsing. A strong visual layout naturally increases clicks, page views, and discussion discovery.

Your forum looks more premium
A clean content showcase gives your XenForo site a more professional, news-style, magazine-style, or community portal feel without changing your existing forum structure.

Easy to configure, powerful in real use
Create a widget, choose a layout, select a source mode, set your forums or manual thread IDs, and it is ready to display.

Beautiful layout presets included

Classic Mosaic
A strong featured layout with one large story, supporting stories, author avatar support, badges, excerpts, and balanced card sizing. Perfect for a homepage or forum index highlight area.

Magazine
An editorial-style grid designed for category-based presentation. When multiple forum node IDs are configured, the widget can rotate content between nodes so each column feels more varied and balanced.

Hero + List
A large lead story with a clean list of supporting topics. Great for portals, landing pages, and content-heavy communities.

Modern Cards
Responsive card blocks with images, titles, stats, and clean spacing. A flexible choice for many widget positions.

Cinematic
A wide visual presentation for sites that want a more dramatic, media-rich look.

Compact
A sidebar-friendly layout for showing important stories without taking too much space.

Smart content source modes

Latest activity
Show recently active discussions and keep the widget fresh automatically.

Newest threads
Display the newest topics from your selected forums.

Trending
Promote fast-rising topics using a freshness and engagement-based score.

Smart score
Balance freshness, views, replies, and reactions to surface content that deserves attention.

Most viewed
Show threads with the strongest view count.

Most replied
Highlight discussions with the most conversation.

Most reacted
Feature content with strong first-post reaction performance.

Manual mode
Enter specific thread IDs and display them in your own custom order. Perfect for announcements, campaigns, featured releases, sponsored content, or hand-curated editorial sections.

Image handling that makes your content stand out

Automatically extracts the first usable image from a thread post
Supports image attachments and IMG BBCode
Optional fallback image when a thread has no image
Optional setting to skip threads without images
Image density control: Compact, Balanced, or Immersive
Clean cropping with modern responsive presentation
Optimized visual consistency across layout presets

Built for real XenForo 2.3 styling

Top Stories Pro is designed to adapt to your XenForo style instead of fighting it.

It uses XenForo 2.3 style-aware colors, typography behavior, spacing, borders, and responsive layout logic so the widget naturally fits light themes, dark themes, custom styles, and modern design variations.

That means less manual styling work and a better result across different communities.

Useful display details your visitors will notice

Story title
Thread image
Author name
Author avatar in supported layouts
Forum/node label
Date
View and reply stats
Excerpt text
NEW badge for fresh content
HOT badge for active or high-engagement content
Related threads in Magazine layout
Widget title support from XenForo widget settings

Perfect for many site areas

Forum homepage
Category landing pages
Portal pages
Sidebar highlights
Resource/community showcase areas
News-style sections
Product update sections
Featured discussions
Staff-picked content blocks
High-value SEO landing pages

Why this add-on is different

Many widgets only show a simple list of threads. Top Stories Pro is built to create a real content experience.

It does not just show what is new. It helps you decide what deserves attention.

It does not just display posts. It turns discussions into story cards.

It does not force one design. It gives you multiple layout presets for different page positions.

It does not require constant manual work. Smart source modes can keep your showcase updated automatically.

Designed for admins who care about presentation and engagement

If you run a XenForo community, you already know that great content is only valuable when people actually see it.

Top Stories Pro helps you bring your strongest discussions to the surface, create a better first impression, and guide visitors into the topics that matter most.

Whether you run a tech forum, gaming community, resource marketplace, news community, niche forum, support site, or private member community, this add-on gives your content a stronger visual presence.

Quick setup

Install the add-on
Create a XenForo widget using XR Top Stories
Choose your layout preset
Select your source mode
Enter forum node IDs or manual thread IDs if needed
Configure image behavior and badges
Place the widget where your visitors will see it
Done

Give your forum content the spotlight it deserves

Your community already has valuable discussions. Top Stories Pro helps visitors find them faster, click them more often, and stay engaged longer.

Install [XR] Top Stories Pro today and turn your XenForo 2.3 forum into a more visual, more active, and more professional community experience.