Vanilla 2: Bugs and Suggestions

GMAntonz

I've been playing with the latest Vanilla 2 beta from GitHub and I thought I share some of my observations on bugs and minor improvements.

Bugs

1. Post Counts don't update. If I delete a discussion completely, the post count does not update. So for example: I created 5 discussions, when I delete one, it says that General still has 5 discussions and it says 5 under My Discussions, but I only see the 4 that are left.

2. Conversations: I started a (private) conversation with another member. After a few posts, I cleared the history, thus removing that conversation. Then I started a brand new one with the same person, however in my list of conversations, the one that is shown is still the old one with the last reply made by my friend. Clicking on it however takes me to the new conversation which I just started.

3. In the Dashboard, General Forum settings, the Forum Home Screen does not seem to actually change anything.

4. Site Settings > Messages. When I selected to put my message above all content on all other pages (profile, discussions, etc) it actually puts it below all content, not above.

5. Perhaps its not a bug, but when looking at another users profile (even if not logged in) there is an option to Remove picture. When you click on it you get "You do not have permission to access the requested resource." This should just be removed and only visible to the actual user and admins.

6. When creating a new discussion, when I click Preview, I get an error:

# FATAL ERROR IN: PHP.ErrorHandler(); "Undefined property: stdClass::$InsertUserID" LOCATION: /home/admin/site/applications/vanilla/views/post/preview.php > 6: > 7:

* > 8: 9: $Author = new stdClass(); >>> 10: $Author->UserID = $this->Comment->InsertUserID; > 11: $Author->Name = $this->Comment->InsertName; > 12: $Author->Photo = $this->Comment->InsertPhoto; > 13: echo UserPhoto($Author); > 14: echo UserAnchor($Author); BACKTRACE: [/home/admin/site/applications/vanilla/views/post/preview.php 10] PHP::ErrorHandler(); [/home/admin/site/library/core/class.controller.php 458] PHP::include(); [/home/admin/site/library/core/class.controller.php 678] Gdn_Controller->FetchView(); [/home/admin/site/library/core/class.pluggable.php 192] Gdn_Controller->xRender(); [/home/admin/site/library/core/class.pluggable.php 192] Gdn_Pluggable->__call(); [/home/admin/site/applications/vanilla/controllers/post.php 135] PostController->Render(); [/home/admin/site/library/core/class.dispatcher.php 218] PostController->Discussion(); [/home/admin/site/index.php 41] Gdn_Dispatcher->Dispatch();

This does not happen when previewing a reply to an already established discussion.



Suggestions. Now for some things which I think if added/changed will improve the experience.

1. Under your profile in the Activity feed you get notified of when people make comments on your discussions. If lets say my friend Luke makes 14 comments in a few of my discussions I get 14 separate notifications there. I think it would be better to display just 1 heading like: "Luke has made 14 comments on your discussions". And when you click on that heading, it would slide down and expand to show you all of the 14 notifications much like now.

2. When starting a new conversation and filling out the To field, it would be great if it acted much like the Facebook auto suggest, where as soon as you start typing in a members name it would start showing you relevant results and you could then select the right person. There is a tutorial on how to achieve this effect here: http://9lessons.blogspot.com/2009/06/autosuggestion-with-jquery-ajax-and-php.html

3. Signatures? I think it would be great to implement signatures, not as yet another separate feature, but take the signature from the user status. So if I update my status on my profile: "Checking out Vanilla2" that now becomes my signature that gets shown in all of my posts on the forum.

4. Buddies/Friends. Would be cool to add a person as a friend, much like bookmarking discussions. The sole purpose there is to follow their activities and posts. Perhaps have a tab in your profile called Friend Activity where it would show what comments and discussions they are making. And you could see last time they visited.

5. Speaking of Discussions. I think Discussions tab on a profile page should display both discussions that user started and the ones they just commented on. Right now it only shows the discussions which they have started, not the ones where they just commented.


I think that's all for now, if I think of more I will add to this thread. I'll keep on playing with Vanilla2!

luc

Bug 6 is corrected in dev, not pushed yet.

Fixes is there (in a discussion) or on a github issue (closed).

samanime

Another bug I discovered is that if you have multiple themes with the same name you get a nice long error message:

Fatal Error in PHP.ErrorHandler();
array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array
The error occurred on or near: /home/content/s/a/m/samanime/html/htmlblox/forums/applications/garden/controllers/settings.php

433: $ThemeManager = new Gdn_ThemeManager();

434: $this->AvailableThemes = $ThemeManager->AvailableThemes();

435: $this->EnabledThemeFolder = $ThemeManager->EnabledTheme();

436: $this->EnabledTheme = $ThemeManager->EnabledThemeInfo();

437: $Name = array_keys($this->EnabledTheme);

438: $Name = $Name[0];

439: $this->EnabledTheme = $this->EnabledTheme[$Name];

440:

441: // Loop through all of the available themes and mark them if they have an update available

GMAntonz

just wanted to bump this, perhaps @Mark or @Todd can provide some feedback?

defused

It would be nice if there could be a extensino or built in for admin-approval of avatars..

Arne

@GMAntonz: The Home screen setting does acutally work (It changes the Discussions-Link to point to "/categories" instead of "/discussions"). The problem is that the default route isn't adjusted: You have to manually set the "DefaultController" to "categories" in Dashboard > Site Settings > Routes.

Mark

First of all, thanks for the feedback. When it comes to bugs in particular, please post them to our issue tracker at github:

http://github.com/lussumo/Garden/issues

3. In the Dashboard, General Forum settings, the Forum Home Screen does not seem to actually change anything.

It changes where the "Discussions" link points to in the main menu.

2. When starting a new conversation and filling out the To field, it would be great if it acted much like the Facebook auto suggest, where as soon as you start typing in a members name it would start showing you relevant results and you could then select the right person.

It should function this way right now (it does for me).

3. Signatures? I think it would be great to implement signatures, not as yet another separate feature, but take the signature from the user status. So if I update my status on my profile: "Checking out Vanilla2" that now becomes my signature that gets shown in all of my posts on the forum.

Signatures as a core feature in every other forum package was one of the reasons why I made Vanilla in the first place - so I could kill them forever I do like your idea of using their "Status" instead of a signature, though. However, it still sounds like a plugin to me.

Awesome suggestions all around

GMAntonz

@Mark thanks for the feedback!

The function of dropping down the list of users when starting a discussion doesn't seem to work for me. I can see the To input field increase in height by about 10 or so pixels, but that's it, can't seem to see anything else show up. Using the latest Firefox 3, javascript/css enabled, no issues with any other forum functions.

I know what you mean about signatures, I hate when people put images, smilies and etc in them. Thus thats why I made my suggestion of having the status as a sig. I'll see if perhaps I or someone else will make it into a plugin.

GMAntonz

Edit: doesn't work in IE either, gives me the following js error:

Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2)
Timestamp: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:54:53 UTC


Message: Invalid argument.
Line: 12
Char: 9807
Code: 0
URI: http://vanillaforums.org/js/library/jquery.js


Message: Permission denied
Line: 19
Char: 27021
Code: 0
URI: http://vanillaforums.org/js/library/jquery.js


Message: Permission denied
Line: 19
Char: 27021
Code: 0
URI: http://vanillaforums.org/js/library/jquery.js


Message: Permission denied
Line: 19
Char: 27021
Code: 0
URI: http://vanillaforums.org/js/library/jquery.js

Stash

3. Signatures - much as I was drawn to Vanilla because of its lack of sigs, I actually quite like this suggestion. Would be a good plugin! Make it tie into twitter and facebook as well though... (both ways!).

5. Participated Discussions - definitely agree this one should be core!

Linc

@GMAntonz Bugs: #5 was fixed, and I *think* #6 was too (that, or I just can't reproduce with the latest build). Added #1 and #3 to GitHub as issues 176 and 177, respectively. I'll try to remember to come back to this in the morning to check out the rest of what needs to get reported.

@samanime I think that bug was fixed, too. Can't reproduce any more in the latest version. If you grab the latest from Git and it's still there, please let us know.

@GMAntonz I really like the Friends/Follow idea as an addon. That has a lot of potential. I also like the idea of collapsing multiple things a person does into a single block of Activity, but then I think about what a cluster that sort of set up is on Facebook (imho). An idea worth exploring, though.

Linc

Reported bug #2 above as issue #181 and #4 as issue #182 (and confirmed them).