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Vanillaforums.org has been Updated

ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
edited June 2011 in Releases
We've been working our butts off over the past couple of months improving the core of Vanilla and we are almost ready to start rolling those changes out in version 2.0.18 with a few new plugins too. Some of these changes have worked their way into our very own support community here and I thought it would be a good idea to give a summary of what we've done.

Voting is Out, Questions are In

We've had a voting system for a while now, but we've really noticed that it hasn't been used all that much by the community. We're not exactly sure why that is as we haven't received much feedback either.

Since the community support site's primary purpose is to answer questions, we decided to add our new Q&A system to the forum. When you go to start a discussion you can now designate it as a question. When your question gets answered you are encouraged (i.e nagged) to either accept or reject the answer.

Our goal is to really try and enforce a bit of a social contract here. If you want a question answered then you have a small job too: you have to let people know that your question has been answered by accepting the answer. Not much work, but it will allow others know when things are answered as well as allow us at Vanilla HQ what we should read and what we can gloss over.

Categories are Back

We've had categories disabled for a little under a year now, but based on community feedback we feel it's time we brought them back. The community has enough activity now that it'll be nice for some people with more limited time to concentrate on just one or two categories.

We've started off with just a few categories as we truly believe that over-categorization is a cardinal sin of forums. Here's a quick run down of how we think the categories should be used.

Questions

This is the category that should be used to ask most questions.

Feedback

Got some feedback or feature idea? Talk about it here. I'd love to see people spit balling some extra fun ideas here.

Developers

This is a category specifically for people that are writing code for and with Vanilla right now. You're going to need permission to post here as I want this to be a place where people that are doing stuff can talk with other people that are doing stuff. If you want to post in this category just ask, but give a reason too.

Localization

We want to see Vanilla translated into as many other languages as possible. However, since people that do this are usually writing in other languages we think it's best to give them their own area.

Blog

This category isn't a real blog (yet), but I really want a place to post little tips and tricks and whatnot. I actually struggle with writing so I figure if I can just post a paragraph here and a paragraph there I can actually get some info out there. Vanilla can do a tonne of cool things that you probably don't even know about.
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Comments

  • Is it just me or is the CSS for chrome a bit off?

    I'm seeing 3 brown bars on the top of every discussion

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  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
    Hmm, I'll have to check that, thanks!
  • Lookin better :)

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  • i think a polling plugin would be of better use than the voting
  • the questions and answers updates though are nice
  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
    You know @bobtheman, I'm not even sure a polling plugin would be good for this site. Mainly though, we are getting less and less interested in suggestions that don't reference any personal experience or use-case at all.

    Part of contributing to a community is writing posts with a little more thought than one sentence.
  • LincLinc Detroit Admin
    Sexy. I have theories about why voting wasn't well-received, but suffice to say I think the Q&A structure is much simpler/elegant and more useful.

    My 1 suggestion for a category would be to automatically put plugin-associated discussions into their own category for easier filtering. Probably requires some custom coding I'm not ready to pony up though so consider it just a bookmarked idea for later :)
  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
    I'd love to hear your theories on voting. If not for this forum, but in general. I recommend the Developer category:)
  • ntuyelikntuyelik New
    edited June 2011
    2.0.18.b2 is really nice.
    especially I liked q&a plugin and moved "new message counter" next to category name.new tag style seems better.How can we make it in 2.0.17.10?
    I would like to see also tags next to category name.
  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
    The new tag style is all just css. There's nothing special about it.
  • The new tag style is all just css. There's nothing special about it.
    could you please share it?
  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
    Pretty sure this is all of it:
    div.Tags ul.PanelInfo li a {
    font-weight: bold;
    float: none;
    }

    .Tags .PanelInfo li {
    background: rgba(246, 218, 168, .2);
    display: inline-block;
    margin: 2px 0;
    padding: 5px 3px;
    text-align: left;
    line-height: 100%;
    border: solid 1px #EED3A2;
    -moz-border-radius: 3px;
    }
    .Tags li a {
    float: none;
    }

    .Count {
    background: none repeat scroll 0 0 #744000;
    color: #FEF7DF;
    padding: 0 3px;
    -moz-border-radius: 3px;
    }
  • thanks very much :)
  • @Todd how about some rounded corner love for us webkit users. :) www.border-radius.com
  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
    Whoops!
  • Love the new update to vanillaforums.org
    Love the upcoming rounded corners ;-)

    Can we also have the "mark all threads as viewed" plugin on this forum please.

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  • Hello Todd !

    I would like to know the status of the feature " Multi-Site" . I am eager to use VanillaForums as a Multi-Site and Sub-Site hosting :)

    Thanks !
  • ToddTodd Chief Product Officer Vanilla Staff
    Multi-site, yikes! That is actually a direction that we are moving away from. In my mind the future of the web is to have several different sites have the ability to share registrations through oauth or whatever.

    Having a single installation spawn multiple forums all on the same db is heading down the scaling nightmare rabbit hole.
  • Maybe we can split off the topic, find out what @asshu wants to achieve and find another solution :-)

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  • FYI, if you're not logged in, you can't view the Blog category or any discussions within it (such as http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/16200/vanilla-2.0.18-beta-2-is-now-available)
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