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:

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!

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!

We’ve just implemented a long overdue update to the Vanilla Addons Site. Fixes & improvements include:

• Searching & Browsing addons has been improved, with new options for sorting and filtering by Vanilla version
• Users can now upload screenshots and icons for their addons
• Vanilla 2 addons are not marked as Vanilla 1 addons when new versions are uploaded
• Paging works properly past the second page of results when browsing addons

But that’s not all, we’ve also taken another giant step towards open sourceyness by making the entire addons application available at GitHub. Now anyone from the Vanilla community can get a copy of the addons application, enable it on their local garden installation, implement new features, and send us pull requests so we can get your features into the core application faster and easier.

We can’t wait to see what you guys come up with! Oh, and remember, you don’t have to change the core if you don’t want to – you can submit plugins for the addons site, as well. One feature that we’d love to see is a tab for the user profile pages that shows which addons a user has created. Feel free to tackle that one if it interests you :)

Welcome to the new age of Vanilla – where the community truly drives the product.

We’re heading out to Montreal today, and we’re going to be speaking at Last Drinks of Summer for the Montreal tech community. Looking forward to telling people about Vanilla & TechStars!

If you’re in Montreal, come out and say hi!

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!

VanillaForums.com is our new Vanilla hosting service, where you can get your own Vanilla 2 forum up and running in just a few moments.

We are launching VanillaForums.com in “beta” as we are still finishing up some of the upgrade/premium features. However, many of you have been asking us for this service, so we didn’t want to wait another minute to let you start using it.

Sign up, sign in, have fun, and stay tuned for more news and information about it.

If you run into any bugs, feel free to use the brand new VanillaForums.com category on the community forum to report them.

Welcome to the new VanillaForums.org website. This new site is a complete replacement of all our various web properties that were previously scattered across multiple domains and servers. Now you can get all of your Vanilla-related information in one place.

The entire site is built on our new Garden platform, the same code that Vanilla 2 is being built on. Our new community forums is an import of all our data from the old “Lussumo” community forum in a brand new Vanilla 2 installation.

If you encounter any errors while using VanillaForums.org, please report them on our issue tracker