Vanilla

We just completed a big upgrade for search in Vanilla that uses MySQL’s fulltext capabilities. The results are finally useful, and the search is fast. Try it out on our community forum.

↳ Pssst. Are you a Vanilla 2 early adopter? If so, read this:

If you have a forum hosted at VanillaForums.com, the Custom CSS upgrade is now available. Sign into your forum, go to your dashboard, and click the “Custom CSS” link under “Appearance” in the side menu. You can start previewing css customizations before purchasing the upgrade.

We put a lot of work into this one, and we hope you like it. We also created a Custom CSS help page that includes frequently asked questions, as well as examples of common css customizations, and tips & tricks.

Photo credit: Talia Frenkel/American Red Cross

I received an inspiring email last night from a Vanilla user. Marvin Chery wrote:

I always say that the most amazing thing for me as a developer is to see how people use my software. Normally I’m talking about the plugins, themes, or modifications that people make to the code. But today I am once again blown away. I am so glad that we could play our little part in all of this.

Thanks to Marvin for reaching out!

Last night TechCrunch broke the story that we’ve closed our first funding round for Vanilla, and we have launched our first premium upgrades for our hosting service at VanillaForums.com. Todd and I couldn’t be happier about our financing, our investors, or the future of Vanilla. We’ve had tight lips about everything for the last few months – I’ve had such a hard time keeping everything quiet as all of the loose ends were tied up, that I had to stop going to our community forum and even stop tweeting so often to keep myself from slipping up and saying something I shouldn’t. So, now that the cat is out of the proverbial bag, I’d like to tell the story of our funding.

The Road to Financing

We officially began looking for funding on August 7th, 2009 at the TechStars investor day in Boulder, Colorado. Investor day was, of course, the culmination of months of work on our product and our pitch at the TechStars program. We were well received, and had a fantastic day meeting investors from across North America. One of the investors we met that day would end up leading our financing round (John Stokes from Montreal Startup), others whom we had already met through the TechStars program would end up following on with a significant investment (eonBusiness in Denver), and another investment group in the room would also end up joining the round (Norseman Capital in Denver).

Following the end of our time at TechStars, I went into full-time “find investors” mode. Using the little amount of money remaining from TechStars, I traveled across North America to New York, San Francisco, and Montreal for meetings with investors I had met on investor day. Before going into TechStars, I thought that this part of the process would be torture, but I must admit that I had a lot of fun meeting with everyone and telling people about Vanilla.

When you walk into a room of investors, you never know how things are going to go. Some people don’t have a clue what your company does, others think they know it better than you do and are biased in ways you cannot fathom, and others truly do have a fantastic understanding of your idea. On September 30th, 2009 we pitched to a room full of investors at the Microsoft campus just outside of San Francisco in Mountain View, California. Once again, we met a ton of amazing investors and I was once again set off in motion arranging follow-up meetings that would take up weeks of energy and devotion. One of the people I met that day was Eric Klein of Klein Venture Partners. Eric only had a few minutes to talk before running to another meeting, but he was excited about Vanilla and wanted to speak with us further. I didn’t know it at the time, but Eric is the VP of marketing for Java at Sun Microsystems. The open-source Gods smiled upon us that day, because Eric later invested in Vanilla, and also came on our board of directors and agreed to devote significant amounts of his time to helping Vanilla succeed. He has already proven to be a fantastic asset, and we couldn’t be happier to have him involved.

After meeting all of these investors, I can honestly say that you can never tell how things are going to shake out. When I first met John Stokes, he asked if we’d consider moving to Montreal instead of trying to open up shop in the US. I told him straight-up that we weren’t interested. At the time, we had our minds and hearts set on staying in Boulder. It was only after I further spoke with John over telephone and email, and then Todd and I both went to Montreal to meet with his partners, that we became very serious about Montreal.

You may have read about us in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago in an article about the Startup Visa movement in the US. It was painful for me when that article came out, because it was at a time that I couldn’t openly speak about our funding round and how excited we were about it, our investors, or moving to Montreal. And to them it must have read like we really didn’t want to be in Canada. The reality, however, is that we had wanted to be in the US (Boulder, specifically), and we even had other offers from investment firms to lead our round that would have allowed us to stay in Boulder. In the end, the benefits of being Canadians operating a business in Canada were too great. There are no visa issues, there are all kinds of government incentives, there is a fantastic community of entrepreneurs in Montreal, not to mention across Canada from Toronto to Vancouver (who have been emailing us saying we should stay), there is a thriving open-source community ever-growing in Montreal, and the partners at MSU (Montreal Startup) are smart, friendly, helpful, and even have other open-source investments, and a keen understanding of open source.

Life After Financing

We made the decision to go with MSU months ago. Since then we’ve been working with lawyers on both sides of the border getting our financing arranged. This was a process that I was not prepared for. It has been expensive, time consuming, and exhausting. However, we come out of the closing of our financing ready to move ahead at full-steam. Now that we have the resources, we want to kick Vanilla into overdrive by ramping up sales & marketing, development, and delivering to our customers.

Our First Offerings

We are extremely pleased to announce that we are now offering our first two premium upgrades on the hosting service at VanillaForums.com (custom domains and ad-removal), and we will be releasing our third upgrade (Custom CSS) later this week. If you are a customer, we are always available, and we want your feedback. Feel free to contact us any time at: support [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.

Staffing Up

I have sold my house, and I will be heading to Montreal in the first week of February. We will be opening an office in Montreal shortly therafter, and we are now hiring. If you are a developer in Montreal, or if you are a marketing/sales person with a great understanding of SEO and ad-targeting, contact us: jobs [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.

And Beyond

Since making the decision to apply to TechStars, our lives have completely changed. We have a network of mentors and colleagues who are constantly rallying behind us, we closed our first round of financing with helpful, friendly, and supportive investors, and we finally have the resources to take Vanilla where it needs to go. Now, we just need to deliver.

Addendum

On a closing note, I should mention that if you are an entrepreneur and any of this sounds like the direction you want to go, they are now accepting applications at TechStars in Boulder. It changed my life, and it could change yours, too. If you have questions about TechStars, feel free to drop me an email: mark [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.

Today we launched a new theme for VanillaForums.org with a much needed increase in contrast over the last one. We had a lot of fun making this theme, and we think it’s a good indicator for how much you can change the look & feel of Vanilla without making many changes to the xhtml. This theme, for example, only required that we edit the default.master.php master view. Every other view throughout Garden, Vanilla, and Conversations remained unchanged. We hope you like it!

Yesterday we did a big push to VanillaForums.com that included all of the latest fixes & improvements to the core Vanilla & Garden packages available at GitHub. This upload also included a number of big improvements to our hosting service, as well as a peek at the premium upgrades that are going to be available soon.

This morning we pushed a tiny change to GitHub that is really only three lines of code, but affects the abilities of Vanilla in an incredible way: Theme Hooks. The idea came to us this week when one of the community members explained how they were working on a theme that displayed part of the first comment in a discussion right on the discussion list. The discussion list doesn’t provide that field, so the theme author was writing ajax into his theme so he could pull the data from outside of the page and place it there. Obviously this is an immensely innefficient method to displaying data. What he really should have been able to do was alter the discussion query so that it gets the field he requires all in the same query.

The problem was that themes were essentially just html, css, and inline javascript – nothing more. In order to change the query to get that extra field, he would either have to write a sister plugin that would get the data and must be enabled in order for the theme to look right – or do his method of querying a separate page to get the data for every single discussion on the page. It just didn’t make sense to us that themes don’t have the ability to change the applications in a more effective way. So, it dawned on us that if themes had a pluggable hooks file just like applications do, they would be able to plug into the applications in truly infinite ways. So, three lines of code later, themes are now pluggable – and our community member can remove a few hundred lines of javascript code in exchange for about ten lines of theme hooks.

It’s really simple to make your theme pluggable, just create a “hooks.php” file in the root of your theme folder and place a shell pluggable class in there, like this:

class ThemeHooks implements Gdn_IPlugin {
   public function Setup() {
      return TRUE;
   }
}

Then your theme can do whatever a plugin can do just by adding some methods to that class and hooking into the applications in any way you choose. Happy Theming!

The next time you visit your dashboard at VanillaForums.com, you’ll notice things have changed quite a bit. We’ve made massive sweeping upgrades to the user interface design both on the administrative side, and the user-facing side. We’ve also added the ability to add, rename, and delete your forums. Most importantly, we’ve added a placeholder page for premium upgrades.

Many of you have been emailing us asking when you will be able to purchase upgrades like domain hosting, ad-removal, white labeling, and single sign-on. We are working hard at making these (and more) upgrades available. This most recent update to the site is a big step in that direction. Expect more changes, upgrades, and payment options soon!

While we’ve been hard at work getting Vanilla 2 ready for it’s official release, others in the community have been hard at work fixing lingering bugs and adding feature refinements to Vanilla 1. Vanilla 1.1.10 is now available. The main changes in this release are replacement of deprecated functions, and updates to Scriptaculous and Prototype.

You can find upgrade instructions here:

http://code.google.com/p/lussumo-vanilla/wiki/VanillaUpgrading

And you can download it here:

http://vanillaforums.org/download

A big downside of the modularity of Vanilla 2 is that we ended up with far too many stylesheets for theme designers to wrestle with. There was a base stylesheet for the garden application, another for the profile page, another for the activity stream, and then every other application had its own stylesheet as well. This meant that to get an entire site styled, it required that the theme designer edit up to 5 stylesheets just for the basic “Vanilla & Conversations” installation. We did what we could to simplify the stylesheets themselves, and re-use common elements throughout applications – but in the end, as expected, the community came back with many complaints about the difficulties in creating custom css-based themes.

After taking a lot of input from the community, and consulting many colleagues in the graphic design field, we decided to switch things up. This morning I pushed the first revision of our new approach to styling a multi-application Garden site. First of all, we’ve isolated all of the administrative pages to their own admin master view, and their own admin.css file. Second, we took all common elements from the user-facing/front-end pages and consolidated them to a single style.css file. So, the user profile page, activity stream, login page, popups, menu styles, and all common element styles are contained therein. Of course every application (Vanilla, Conversations, etc) will need its own custom css file to handle non-standard layout issues created in new applications, but the application css files are greatly decreased in size.

To put it simply, every user-facing page will use the style.css file, and the related application css file – there should only be two css files on any user-facing page. We also changed the style of the administrative pages using the admin.css file. This was done on purpose to give the user a clear visual cue that they’re in a completely different, admin-only part of the site. For the most part, theme designers will only ever have to touch the style.css file when creating their themes!

Last night the Rackspace Cloud experienced power outages that affected our database servers for VanillaForums.com. Due to the unexpected shutdown, our database servers automatically repaired some damaged tables. One of these tables was the mysql.user table, where it removed a corrupted user record, resulting in connections to the database servers from our web servers being denied. This caused the entire system to be inaccessible for approximately 8 hours until we were made aware of the problem.

We have fixed the issue on our main database server, and access has been restored. There are still fixes that need to be implemented, and we are working through all of the forums to ensure the data is intact. If you find that your forum was corrupted in some way by this shutdown, please contact us at support [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.