During Make Web Not War, we had the opportunity to discuss Vanilla with CT Moore of NVI Solutions.
Calling All Themers! by Brendan Sera-Shriar
I just wanted to post a quick update on Vanilla 2 theme development. I have been working on a bunch of new themes to be released on vanillaforums.com and in Addons. I uploaded a sneak peak to our flickr pool, let me know what you think?
More importantly I would really love for the community to contribute Vanilla 2 themes as well! We are planning on re-designing the Addons or building a new repository to showcase all the hard work and skill Vanilla 2 community members have.
So start theming away an upload them to Addons!
Vanilla2 Presentation at MonDev Open Source Demo Camp by Brendan Sera-Shriar
Next week, May 24-28, is MonDev – Open Source Week Montreal. Mark will be doing a presentation on Vanilla 2 at Open Source Demo Camp on Tuesday night at Brutopia. If you’re in the Montreal area come out and have a drink with the Vanilla crew. We will also be at StartUpDrinks the following night and at Make Web Not War on Thursday.
It’s going to be a long week :)
New Vanilla, New Themes by Brendan Sera-Shriar
I have been designing and developing themes for platforms like WordPress and Drupal for a very long time and I am very happy to be putting my skills to the test with Vanilla. Admittedly I do not have much experience with theming forums. I did use phpBB back in the day and built a handful of styles ;)
I was browsing through the community forum looking for discussions on themes and came across quite a few interesting topics. A lot of members are looking for more.
I really love how most community-supported projects like WordPress have an active community of CSS wizards making up styles for personal and community use.
We had a ton of community-made styles for Vanilla 9.x, but very few for 1.x. What’s up with that? What happened with the Clockworks? (just like Default but in different cool “iMac” colors?) The Roots? (dark background, new format for determining old/new threads, sidebars on the other side, etc) Others?
Are there any themes out there with a stronger contrast, especially for words to background? I like the themes on offer, but not much good if some people aren’t able to read. I’m asking from an accessibility viewpoint, as all the themes I’ve seen so far aren’t accessible to everyone
I’d like to see some Vanilla2 “live” sites, better if modded or with alternative themes/styles.
I mean forums not hosted on vanillaforums.org.
hopefully as v2 grows more an more developers will start to create themes and post them on the addon page.
I have started work on a few different theme categories that I hope make it in V2, and that I hope the community finds useful. I know Mark has been working on some themes that target areas like Bug Tracking and Feedback. I’m looking to design a few themes that target Social, Media, Corporate, and Advertising.
Recently I have been really thinking about where forums are going? can I make a forum not look like a forum, but still be as functional and powerful? and can a forum be used for more than just a forum?
This is where I hope to start taking Vanilla 2 in terms of design with help from the community. I’d like to know what kind of themes you guys think are missing? Education, Government, Marketing, Technology, Retail, etc…
What kind of plugins and features should be developed to compliment these themes? Galleries, Podcasting, Social, jQuery features, Pages, Banners, Simple image uploads, etc…
It’s going to be a whole new Vanilla…at least under theme options :)
Dashboard Makeover by Brendan Sera-Shriar
I’m very happy that my first post gets to be about a topic I am very passionate about: design. When I first met with the Vanilla team I was given the software tour (admittedly I had never used Vanilla before) and I was very surprised to see such a cool forum solution, however, the design was not doing much for me.
Granted, it was a very easy interface to navigate and understand, but that does not mean we can’t make it look cooler :)
So, with the official Vanilla 2 release around the corner, Mark, Todd, and I decided it was time to start thinking about a dashboard makeover. I was given the go ahead to “make it prettier”. In keeping with the Vanilla spirit, I wanted to create a very clean, simple, and easy to use interface.
But first a bit of history
If you’re a veteran user of Vanilla you will be familiar with version 1. This was not an easy screenshot to get. I had to install vanilla 1 on my machine to grab it, which took 3 tries (remember, I’m a designer), or as Todd would say “read the on screen instructions and stop clicking everywhere!”.
(circa 2005).
When vanillaforums.com launched a year ago Mark rolled out a new design, a place holder for bigger and better things to come (me :) ).
circa 2009
Now with version 2 soon approaching I felt it was time for a full makeover.
Click to view larger image
The color scheme
The idea was to adopt a very subtle 3 color scheme: light blue, grey, and white.
The sidebar
I cleaned up the sidebar.
I have added a new Vanilla icon to the top. I also wanted to create an obvious division between main category headings and add some relevant icons.
Icon set
Icons are something I felt was missing from the over all design. I used the Glyphish icon set. I wanted something very simple and subtle that I could easily re-color. They have been added to the sidebar and inner pages.
The top bar
Not much has changed here. I re-skinned the buttons, and added a few new options and displays.
You may be wondering what the “My account” button is for. This is a surprise for .com users :) Keep watching for updates.
Content Areas
I’m very happy with how the inner content areas turned out. Again, not much has changed in terms of layout.
Table formatting has remained the same as well, I just implemented our new color scheme and cleaned up the over all look and feel a bit.
I also created a whole new set of message boxes. There message boxes, not much to say…
In light of the up coming launch, we would like to open the discussion up to the community. This is not a final design yet, there is still a bit of tweaking to do before we launch it, and most importantly we want your feedback!
Tell us what you think. Vanilla has always respected the community that has helped build it.
This new dashboard will also allow us to roll out some other improvements we’ve been holding off for a bit as they didn’t make sense before. Keep an eye on this blog.
Also make sure to check out our new flickr pool to view more screens, and join our facebook group to stay in the loop.
GitHub Url Change by Vanilla Team
We’ve changed our main account name from lussumo to vanillaforums. This means that you will need to grab your github installs of Vanilla 2 from http://github.com/vanillaforums/Garden.
If you’re working with a local branch of the project, you will need to update the project’s url in your config file. Navigate to the root folder of your copy of the repo, and then go into the .git folder and edit the “config” file. Look for the following line:
url = git@github.com:lussumo/Garden.git
And change it to:
url = git@github.com:vanillaforums/Garden.git
Welcome Aboard! by Vanilla Team
We’ve just completed two new hires at Vanilla!
Brendan Sera-Shriar is an open-source advocate, web designer and developer. Known online as Digibomb, Brendan has been an active member of the WordPress community – often speaking at conferences about WordPress theming and integrations. At Vanilla Brendan will be helping us to improve our theming capabilities, deliver quality custom themes, and will work closely with the user & developer community. You will start to see a lot more of Brendan here on the blog, on twitter, and on the community forums very soon :)
Tim Gunter is a senior PHP developer who has a lot of experience working with OOP PHP Frameworks. He will be helping us improve Vanilla’s performance at massive scale, and generally improving the core product and offerings. You can find him on the community forum, and very soon you’ll be seeing his commits and contributions on GitHub!
Welcome to Vanilla, guys!
Make Web Not War FTW Competition by Vanilla Team
Vanilla is a community sponsor of the Make Web Not War conference in Montreal on May 27, 2010. You should definitely check it out!
More importantly, however, I wanted to tell you about the FTW “For The Web” coding competition:
Here’s the deal: Simply code or port a web application onto Windows/IIS or Windows Azure. That’s it, that’s all. All applications that fall into any of the following categories, and are on Windows/IIS or the Windows Azure Cloud are eligible.
- PHP Application (PHP on Windows+IIS or PHP on Windows Azure)
- Windows Azure Cloud Application (Any Language: .Net, PHP, Ruby, Python…)
- Open Government Application (Use of Open Data Catalogues on Windows or Windows Azure on Any Language)
Aside from the chance to win come nice techy hardware, the winner will get bragging rights, and a romantic dinner with Mark from Vanilla*.
*Note: Mark will not actually attend or pay for the dinner.
Translation Improvements in Vanilla 2 by Mark O'Sullivan
Thanks to a ton of contributions we’ve been getting from the community developers, today we pushed a big set of changes around translations in Vanilla 2.
The first improvement is around date formatting. In order to allow multi-lingual date translations, we’ve moved the date definitions into the locale files, and now implemented php’s strftime function for date formats. You can check out these changes on our development branch of Vanilla 2.
The second improvement was to add a convenience function for performing translations. From now on you can use the T() function to perform translations. We’ve implemented this change across every single file in Vanilla 2. You do not need to worry about this change breaking your applications, plugins, or themes – as we’ve left the deprecated Translate() function in the core for the time being. Moving forward, however, you should switch it out with the T() convenience function.
Forum Misnomers by Mark O'Sullivan
We’ve recently been working on some tasks that have us looking at other forum offerings to see how they structure their data. The interesting thing I’ve found is that they all seem to have a common set of naming conventions to their data that is inconsistent with ours. It breaks down like this:
| This word in theirs: | is this in Vanilla: | meaning this: |
|---|---|---|
| forum | Category | A method for categorizing/organizing discussions |
| thread | Discussion | The topic of discussion |
| post | Comment | The actual content of a message posted by a user within a discussion |
Their names and our names have similar meanings except for one: forum/Category. In our minds a forum is the container for all discussions, not a way of categorizing them. A different forum in Vanilla would have a completely different set of users, while a category serves only as a method of filtering discussions to their various sections. This is really just a difference of opinion, since technically we could make a page like most other forum packages have where it lists all of the categories, the number of discussions in each, the time of the latest discussion, etc. But we’ve always founds pages like this to be utterly pointless in smaller communities. We’ve always thought, “Why do you have to go digging to find the discussions? Why can’t they just be up-front in the user’s face when they get to the forum?”
So, we have some differences of opinion with the meaning of data structures in traditional forum software. Fair enough, we’re not trying to do what’s been done before. Lately, however, there have been some new friends on the playground. Get Satisfaction, for example, has a strict set of categories: Questions, Ideas, Problems, and Praise. Get Satisfaction is trying to specifically help businesses by giving their customers a place to get help (or share their thoughts) on a product in a structured way. The really interesting thing about their approach is that these four “categories” aren’t just words to describe the discussions within, they actually have meanings that are completely separate from each other.
All too often I’ve seen Vanilla forum categories fall into the trap of being so similar in meaning that people don’t know where to start their discussions (ie. Joe wants to start a discussion called “The theory behind Vanilla”, should it go in the “Vanilla 1″ category, or the “Vanilla 2″ category?). With Get Satisfaction it goes a step further and allows special features for each of their four categories. For example, you can “Like” an “Idea”, or you can say “I have this problem, too!” for a discussion about a “Problem”, etc. In my mind, this is where the real innovation appears.
That being said, I look around the web at the “big” social sites, and I see almost all of them as “forums” in one way or another. If you’re looking at the data structure alone, Digg is a forum where you share and discuss links. Facebook is a forum where you share and discuss your thoughts, your pictures, your videos, etc. The difference between a traditional forum (structurally) is that no discussion title is required – they are just lists of comments with various “media” attached, and comments in reply to comments (threading), etc. They throw in “Likes” or “Diggs” to add social currency to the mix.
All of these things are possible with Vanilla, and we want to drive the software in these directions, so we can help businesses grow their communities in any way they see fit – as support-style forums that allow their customers to get answers, or as community-hubs where their users can interact in a fun and meaningful way, etc.
The really interesting thing is that all of this growth stems from our conceptions of the data underneath, and these “misnomers” that draw the divide between Vanilla and traditional forum software.