Vanilla

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!

We’ve just released our product roadmap over on the documentation wiki. If you are curious about where we’re going with Vanilla & the hosting service at VanillaForums.com, check it out!

Years ago the members at the Vanilla community forum convinced me to put up a donations button and run a drive to get me a new laptop for Vanilla development. The drive was a great success, and I’m actually writing this blog post on the laptop that they paid for (thanks, guys!).

Since then, the amount of money we make in donations is very small. At best, it typically covers our annual domain registration fees. That isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the money that people do donate, but I have questioned whether we should have the donation button there at all.

Then every once in a while something strange happens: someone donates a lot of money. Matt Mullenweg was the first person to donate a lot of money (and I was finally able to thank him in person on last Monday when he came into TechStars).

Two weeks ago we released Garden & Vanilla 2 on GitHub, and three days later I received another very large donation. This time the donation came from long-time supporter David McKendrick of fused network, a hosting company. I contacted David to personally thank him, and he responded:

[...] have always loved what you do and even though I’ve been following you for years — never did have the ‘liquidity’ to really reward you as much as I should have been. [...] I’ve got a lot of faith in [Vanilla] & your other endeavors.

Thanks, David!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was recently interviewed by Jolie O’Dell from Read Write Web. Check it out!

Source: Video Interview with Founder of Vanilla, “A WordPress for Forums”

Thanks to Jolie for the interview!

Yesterday I was interviewed by Jolie O’Dell, who writes for Read Write Web. One of the questions that came up was: is there room for forums on the real-time web?

I can’t stop thinking about the question. This is a common point that I’m starting to hear more and more not just about forums, but about any social interaction tools on the web, and it’s an important issue to address.

I’ll start by saying that the real-time web is cool. You can’t ignore that it is awesome to be able to watch a Gizmodo liveblog, or watch the news about a celebrity icon’s death unfold on twitter. But does that make non-live forum discussions obsolete? No.

There is an intrinsic value in being able to take part in a discussion on your own time. One of the teams at TechStars this year (TimZon) is entirely based upon this premise: specifically across time zones. We can’t all be online, let alone awake at the same time, so in these situations the real-time web doesn’t work. Forums are always on, and they are expected to operate on a different schedule than real-time.

Forums can provide a much higher quality of content than the real-time web, and that content is left behind for indexing and searching. I read a great blog post by Zeus Jones about how the real time web shapes our information. He argues that real-time information becomes less valuable as time passes and it becomes outdated. Search for anything on Google and you’re guaranteed to find a forum in the first page of results, and nine times out of ten the answer you’re looking for will be in the forum comments. In this way, forums can actually provide timeless information, if not information that is valuable for a much longer period of time.

It’s not a competition. There is a place for forums, and there is a very different place for real-time web. Saying that one will destroy the other is like saying that hockey is going to destroy baseball. If anything, they compliment each other, and will continue to do so in ways that we have yet to discover. With Vanilla we are trying to lead this charge.

Forums are changing. Although it may look similar to Vanilla 1, Vanilla 2 is an entirely different animal with all kinds of real-time web features built right in. While it maintains the singular purpose of nurturing discussion, it has the power to do much more. Thanks to the new plugin framework behind it, you’ll be seeing a lot of new features popping up over the next year that will blur the lines between the static and the real-time web even further.