We are happy to announce the Vanilla Forums Partner Program!
As of right now you will earn a 20% revenue share on any client you bring to VanillaForums.com.
Howdy, Stranger! by Mark O'Sullivan
One of the most common questions we get on the community forums is how can I change the “Howdy Stranger” text on my forum?
While we don’t have complete translations available for Vanilla 2 yet (there are many non-native-English speaking community members working on this), you can most certainly make little text changes on your forum very easily. Generally speaking, you can take just about any word or phrase on the forum, and create a “translation” for it by adding a “locale.php” file to your conf folder, and placing the translations inside. If you want to change the “Howdy, Stranger” text, for example, you would place the following information in your conf/locale.php file:
<?php if (!defined('APPLICATION')) exit();
$Definition['Howdy, Stranger!'] = 'Welcome to our Community!';
$Definition["GuestModule.Message"] = "If you want to take part in the discussions, sign in or apply for membership below!";
Happy translating!
Vanilla 2 Released by Mark
It’s been exactly five years since Vanilla 1 was released back in 2005. Back then Vanilla quickly became one of the most popular discussion forum solutions for small communities, and was even adopted by some rather large communities like Mozilla.
Two years ago we took another look at Vanilla and realized there was still an immense amount of work to be done in the community discussion space. Last year Todd Burry, one of my closest friends, joined me on the project, and since then we’ve attended the TechStars program in Boulder Colorado, raised a seed round for the company, hired staff, and we have been working on Vanilla full-time – all with the goal of getting to this day: the day we present you with Vanilla 2.
Vanilla 2 brings you more of the great user experience you tasted with Vanilla 1, and also allows addon developers to do more than they’ve ever been able to do before. Today, on the day of it’s release, there are already 40 addons available that were created by the Vanilla community developers. The addon turnaround has already been awe-inspiring, but with this official release we know we will be wowed by what this community can accomplish.
Today we invite you to download Vanilla 2 and install it on your server, quickly set up a forum on VanillaForums.com, or get involved in our community forum here at VanillaForums.org.
Vanilla 2 is more than forum software, it is built with the goal of helping communities grow by any means necessary: SEO optimization, participation-driving custom features, or simply a better user experience.
Welcome to Vanilla 2
Vanilla Open Source Community: http://vanillaforums.org
Vanilla Forums Hosting Business: http://vanillaforums.com
Download Vanilla 2: http://vanillaforums.org/download
Vanilla 2 Features: http://vanillaforums.org/features
Vanilla 2 Addons: http://vanillaforums.org/addons
Vanilla 2 Documentation: http://vanillaforums.org/docs
Writing Plugins for Vanilla 2 by Tim Gunter
With the release of Vanilla 2 coming within the next week or so, I thought I would write a little post about a few of the new things we’ve added for plugin authors over the last month. In Part 1 I would like to talk about Plugin Path Handling and UserMeta Storage.
Read More
Vanilla 2 Release Candidate 3 by Mark O'Sullivan
We are pleased to announce Vanilla 2 Release Candidate 3.
Obviously this release has many bug fixes & improvements over the last release candidate. This release also has the inclusion of some new plugins we are planning on bundling with the final Vanilla 2 release. They are a little late to the game, but inclusions that we felt were incredibly valuable:
- Flagging: With this plugin, users can flag content for administrative review. Administrators then have a queue of flagged content in their dashboard for review.
- Tagging: Finally, users can tag discussions and filter discussions by popular tags.
- HtmLawed: We’ve removed HtmlPurifier from our core product due to speed concerns and memory issues it was causing. While we understand that there are caching mechanisms we could have adopted to overcome these issues, we felt that for download customers it was important to have functional HTML in comments out-of-the-box with no special configuration or memory concerns. HtmLawed fit the bill nicely. Be sure to enable this plugin if you upgrade your existing installation, or your HTML in comments will not render correctly.
- Minify: This plugin will merge and compress (minify) css and js files so the forum pages load faster.
Finally, we’ve also made a number of SEO improvements, such as canonical urls so search engine crawlers will ignore redundant urls that show the same content (ie. yourdomain.com/discussions vs yourdomain.com/discussions/index, which both show the same thing).
For more information, including where to download, check out the community discussion at: http://vanillaforums.org/vanilla/discussion/11332/vanilla-2-rc3
Smarty vs PHP by Brendan Sera-Shriar
We have decided to support Smarty Templates in rc2. The decision was made to help designers build custom themes quickly and easily without having to write a bunch of php code.
*NOTE: You can still use php if you like ;)
Quick rundown of the new Vanilla Smarty Templates
We’ve renamed default.master.php to default.master.tpl. You will notice that this .tpl file uses some custom Smarty tags: adding a custom logo, calling discussions and the panel, displaying the searchbox, etc.
We have put together a bunch of help documents and tutorials on using these new features. Also make sure to check all the new Vanilla Template Tags we’ve added to make things easier.
We will be constantly updating the Help & Support area on VanillaForums.com, so make sure to check it frequently.
New VanillaForums.com Blog by Brendan Sera-Shriar
Hey guys, we have launched a new blog on VanillaForums.com! We will be moving a good majority of content over there, specifically anything to do with VanillaForums.com (member news, plans, features, help/support, etc), company news, and anything else not directly related to developers and the VanillaForums.org community.
Over the next few weeks we will be re-designing VanillaForums.org and re-organizing the blog.
Keep checking for updates.
Vanilla 2 Themes Ready for Download! by Brendan Sera-Shriar
I have added 4 new Vanilla 2 themes to the addons on VanillaForums.org. I will be releasing a bunch more over the next few weeks. Play with them and let me know if you find any bugs.
iVanilla
Minalla Yellow
Rounder
Light Grunge
Vanilla Wallpapers – They’re FREE, grab’em! by Brendan Sera-Shriar
I’ve been building theme after theme for the past month for Vanilla 2 and I needed a bit of break. So, I decided to design a few Vanilla wallpapers for fun. I have also set up a flickr group for anyone who would like to contribute a few designs of their own.
Enjoy!
Vanilla Graffiti
Download this wallpaper
The Vanilla Crew
Download this wallpaper
Vanilla Grunge
Download this wallpaper
VUG – Vanilla User Group by Brendan Sera-Shriar
First Official VUG – Vanilla User Group Gathering!
We are excited to host the first ever official Vanilla User Group Gathering in Montreal!!!
The first gathering will take place Tuesday June 22nd at 6:30pm in the new Vanilla headquarters at 645 Wellington St. unit 411 ( Google map )
Come out and meet the Vanilla crew, Mark, Todd, Tim and I (Brendan), learn about Vanilla, have a few drinks, and meet some cool people.
We have set up a community at usergroups.vanillaforums.org for anyone interested in participating. It is our goal to use this community as a portal for VUG’s all over the world! If you are interested in organizing a user group in your city let us know and we will list it on the main site and help you get started!
If you are a local Vanilla user please feel free to comment on the discussion over at usergroups.vanillaforums.org if you have something you want to show or discuss at the gathering. Make sure to sign up so we have a rough idea of numbers. There will be snacks and drinks ;)
We look forward to kicking this off and hope to see more Vanilla User Groups pop up around the world!