Vanilla

Last night the Rackspace Cloud experienced power outages that affected our database servers for VanillaForums.com. Due to the unexpected shutdown, our database servers automatically repaired some damaged tables. One of these tables was the mysql.user table, where it removed a corrupted user record, resulting in connections to the database servers from our web servers being denied. This caused the entire system to be inaccessible for approximately 8 hours until we were made aware of the problem.

We have fixed the issue on our main database server, and access has been restored. There are still fixes that need to be implemented, and we are working through all of the forums to ensure the data is intact. If you find that your forum was corrupted in some way by this shutdown, please contact us at support [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.

How many times have you used a site that requires you to register once for their main service, and again for their forum? It’s an annoying problem that plagues most forum software: it doesn’t integrate well with your existing website. With Vanilla 2 we’ve been working hard to get past this painful issue.

A few weeks ago we quietly released our first step in this direction, a Single Sign-on plugin for Vanilla 2. Our plugin comes bundled with a WordPress plugin that can be used with your WordPress blog to allow your WordPress users to be seamlessly authenticated in Vanilla when they’re already authenticated in WordPress. It also makes it so that links to the Vanilla sign-in and registration pages redirect to your WordPress pages respectively.

While this is great if you are using WordPress, the Vanilla single sign-on plugin doesn’t only work with WordPress, it also works with any application out there. So, if you have a custom application, and you want to know how to integrate it with the Vanilla 2 single sign-on plugin, we’ve just published documentation on our wiki to get you started.

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.

Two weeks ago I went out to NYC to meet with some investors and potential customers about Vanilla. Had an amazing time hooking up with everyone, and also managed to squeeze in some socializing with old friends from the very first forum I ever created – the one that inspired Vanilla.

Yesterday I just got back from San Francisco where we pitched Vanilla at the annual TechStars San Francisco investor day. The response to Vanilla has been fantastic, and we’ve met a ton of bright & interesting new investors as a result.

Now that I’m back I’ll finally have a little bit of time to help out people at the community forum. But there’s no rest for the wicked, and I’ve already got a long list of meetings lined up with investors.

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!

Today The Rackspace Cloud launched tools.rackspacecloud.com, where VanillaForums.com is featured as a recommended forum tool hosted on The Rackspace Cloud. We’re obviously very excited about this partnership, and I thought it was worth writing a post about our experiences dealing with Rackspace and the new Cloud division.

We’ve been hosted on Rackspace in one form or another for over three years. Originally we had a dedicated server through Rackspace, and at the beginning of summer 2009 we moved over to the cloud. I think everyone already knows this, but Rackspace has the best web hosting support on the planet, hands-down. I was lucky enough to almost never need their support due to their unparalleled service, but I was worried that the support I’d receive on their cloud offering would not be up to the same standards as their main hosting division.

I have been amazed to discover that their cloud support is just as good as their main hosting support. They’re fast, friendly, efficient and never give me the “we don’t support those types of questions” line that I so often got from other hosting companies.

Beyond their hosting support, I’ve found everyone at Rackspace to be incredibly supportive of our efforts with Vanilla. Our talks with them have led to this partnership, and VanillaForums.com being featured on their new cloud partner tools site.

Moving forward our goal is to keep improving Vanilla 2 & VanillaForums.com, and with a platform like the Rackspace Cloud and the great people behind it, I know our business will thrive.

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!

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.