I have read and recreated the config files from - http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/9915/vanilla-on-nginx/ but have not been able to get everything working properly. Generally the index.php file loads, but any subsequent page doesn't load. It's clear this has to do with the rewrites.
Would anyone be willing to help me with this issue, maybe via PM or through the threads. I have been trying to walk through this in the #nginx IRC channel, but it's clear I need the help of someone more familiar with Vanilla.
It passes all uri data as query strings to /forums/index.php (which is the location of my vanilla install). What is happening is that Vanilla is not parsing these queries and just displaying the landing (homepage).
Does anyone have anymore information on how Vanilla parses the URI and dispatches it? Am I breaking it because I am sending the queries with q=$query? Any help would be appreciated.
I was able to get this working, but not without hacking the Vanilla Core bit, which I was really trying to avoid. The main issue was that Vanilla was using PATH_INFO to parse the URL's, but #nignx wasn't producing a proper PATH_INFO.
In the file class.url.php the function actually uses 3 different techniques to parse the url, PATH_INFO, ORIG_PATH_INFO, and PHP_SELF. I simply added a block that used REQUEST_URI. I also had to use the SCRIPT_NAME to filter out the subfolder, in my case /forums, from the REQUEST_URI.
This might be a unique problem to me, and not help many other people, but in the class.url.php there is a TODO that says: "Test this on various platforms/browsers. Very breakable." So I thought this may be one of those cases. Again, this may not help anyone else but me, but I think it's worth to have out there, just in case.