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:

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!

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!

By popular demand, I’ve just completed a quick-start guide to theming in Garden & Vanilla 2. With theming, you can completely change the look & feel of your Vanilla 2 forum. I’ve been doing a lot of this lately. While there is a lot of work that goes into theming a forum (so many pages!), we’ve worked really hard to make this process as easy as we can for all you designers out there. Yesterday I created two totally custom themes in just over four hours. I hope everyone else finds it as easy as I have:

A Quick-Start Guide to Theming in Garden & Vanilla 2

I just finished implementing a bunch of html & css fixes/changes to VanillaForums.org. You may have to “hard refresh” your browsers if things seem a little wacky when you first view some of the pages.

The changes include:

• Renamed “Forums” to “Community” in the main menu.
• Changed the layout of the conversations and conversation messages.
• Fixed some of the problems with activities (on the profile and activity pages).
• Fixed a bug that allowed spammers to hijack pages through their statuses.

Stay tuned as we’ll be making many fixes and improvements like these constantly!