Todd and I have been talking about doing some housekeeping to the core application. Many of the classes in the core are currently prefixed with "Gdn_". This is, of course, done to avoid name clashes with classes from other libraries. The "Gdn_" is intended to mean "Garden".
There are a number of classes that have not yet adopted this naming convention throughout Garden, and NONE of the convenience functions in library/core/functions.*.php use this convention. The functions pose a big problem as you get into things like including an external application's templates in a Vanilla template (or vice versa).
It has also been bugging us that Vanilla is the product, and Garden isn't really understood by very many people. We'd like to get rid of the name Garden altogether, and just call the product Vanilla, change the garden application name to "Dashboard", change all functions, class names, and table names to be prefixed with "vn" instead of "Gdn_", and change the GitHub repo to be located at something more like http://github.com/vanillaforums/vanilla.
Obviously this is a huge set of changes, but we feel that these are extremely important changes to make before (a) more people adopt the code and start developing with it, and (b) an official release of Vanilla 2 comes out.
We'd like to know what the community developers (you guys!) think before we take any action.
The folks at Mozilla Labs are working on a collaboration tool for their Concept Series, and they're thinking about using Vanilla 2. They contacted me to see how I thought Vanilla could be altered to meet their requirements, and I told them about some of the things that are possible with the new plugin framework. They got back to me asking if there would be anyone in the community here who might be interested in helping them out.
So, anyone interested?
There is more information about what they're working on here:
I love Vanilla 1 to bits and was keen to try Vanilla 2 but kept running into issues which I could not resolve. I've finally got it up and running with the help of some helpful folk on this forum so I decided to write an extended how-to for Vanilla 2 in case you encounter similar problems to me.
I'd like to reiterate the developers' comments first by saying Vanilla 2 is still in development so you should bear this in mind if you intend on using it on a live site. It could be prone to unexpected bugs/behaviour. If you're unsure/concerned, use Vanilla 1 instead.
Extended How-to install Garden/Vanilla 2
1. Download the latest stable release of Garden from GitHub. What's Garden? It's the platform on which Vanilla runs - but don't fret, Vanilla forum is bundled in with this download.
2. Extract the .zip or .tar and copy the contents into the desired folder on your server. Remember to upload the .htaccess file in the root directory which may not be visible to you if you have these types of files hidden. Most FTP programs have an option to show invisible files if it isn't already set by default.
3. In /conf/config-defaults.php consider uncommenting line 47: // $Configuration['Garden']['Errors']['MasterView'] = 'deverror.master.php'; // <-- Use this error master view when debugging This will enable verbose error messages and is very useful when installing and setting up. These messages will help other forum users with diagnosing any problems you encounter. Of course, once happy with your setup, it's recommended to comment out this line once again, so users encounter 'pretty errors'.
4. Grant Read/Write permissions (777) to /cache/, /conf/, and /uploads/
5. Create a database (name does not matter).
6. Browse to your install folder in your web browser, and follow the instructions on-screen.
As I said, if you encounter any errors and have completed step 3, you should have a verbose error - post this and any information about your server (PHP version etc.) and the steps you performed leading up to the error into the community forums.
Hope that helps - thanks to @benno and @bean for their help in getting my install working. I used their advice, my experience and the Documentation to provide the above information.
Try it out - let us know what you think. If you are a Vanilla 2 early adopter (ie. you've downloaded a copy of Garden/Vanilla from GitHub and you're running it somewhere), there are instructions on how to update your database for search here:
Vanilla 1.2 is going to be a great, significant release. There will be plenty of new features, many of which will be included as new extensions, allowing them to be easily disabled and enabled easily.
Some new features are:
Automatic image width reduction by window size (an upcoming update to HTML Formatter), a feature similar to the one on IP.Board, so that images never create horizontal scrollbars on the page; images will either be too small in width to be sized, or the width will be reduced to the perfect size.
Minification, compression, and a bunch of other speed optimizations (an upcoming extension called Minify) to make the forums load faster for users, especially first-time users.
Whisper notifications (the Whisperfi extension) so that users don't miss whispers
Some will be enabled by default, others won't be. So we want to know, which extensions (if any) do you think add essential functionality to Vanilla 1? There are so many really awesome extensions out there, but we don't want to include most of them, just the ones that add a very commonly used functionality, ones that will be useful for 90% of Vanilla installations.
While we've been hard at work getting Vanilla 2 ready for it's official release, others in the community have been hard at work fixing lingering bugs and adding feature refinements to Vanilla 1. Vanilla 1.1.10 is now available. The main changes in this release are replacement of deprecated functions, and updates to Scriptaculous and Prototype.
Hello! here's what's happening on my forum: simple "Members" have super power, and I'm unable to change that: the changes I make do not get applied. here's how my members permissions look like:
obviously this is a huge mess, as forum users keep changing routes and such help!
I've got a website that I've integrated Vanilla into.
What I'd like to do is be able to tell if a user is logged into Vanilla (Vanilla Root: www.website.com/vanilla/) from the homepage (www.website.com/index.php), and display either a welcome for that user (something like "Welcome Joe! Click here to go to the discussion forum!"), or a login form on the homepage.
I've already got the login form working, I just don't want the login form displaying if the user is already logged in.
I have just installed my first vanilla forum, but when I try to log in it wants to use https... this won't work on my server so is there anyway to disable the behaviour and log in with http only?
Skipping ceremony, this may be a documentation issue because it is stated that Vanilla requires PHP 5.1 or newer (http://vanillaforums.org/page/Requirements) but the code has some cliché required by PHP4.
I guess the code of Vanilla was ported from PHP4, right? This would explain why public fields were excessively used and objects are still passed by reference. Or perhaps the documentation refers to the new version of Vanilla, but that is pretty unreasonable since it's still under active development.
In both cases there's a clear contradiction between code and documentation, it would be nice to state explicitly to which exact version of Vanilla the documentation refers to. Good examples are the Doctrine and Zend Framework documentation which display a link (Doctrine) or a dropdown (ZF) to select the documentation version.
I have bunch of articles on my website and i have vanilla 1.10 forum. I was wondering if it is possible to create comments for those articles outside of the forum. I am sure it is possible, I am not quite sure where I should start. Does anyone knows if there are extension that would perform a function like this. Thank you
Very new here. Just took over development of a site that is running a 1.1.4 Vanilla install.
New version of the site and forum overhaul scheduled for early Feb, so I'm guessing Vanilla 1 is what I should go with, and upgrade later. I'm guessing Vanilla 2 will be an easy upgrade - or hoping.
I'm completely green with Vanilla. I've got a bunch of noob questions regarding upgrading, testing a new theme in the forum while the old version is still live. I did a search but didn't get the answers I need, and I apologize if I missed them.
1) So, looking at the installation upgrade instructions on Google, I don't see instructions to upgrade from 1.1.4 to 1.1.10 (shouldn't that be 1.1.2 ?? :)
So I'm looking for guidance on how to do that - how do I upgrade from 1.1.4 to 1.1.10, by downloading the newest version and going through the list, dropping files in as I go? Should I just overwrite the entire directory, aside from any config files?
2) Also, I'll be creating a new theme / skin / whatever for the forum, and I'm wondering how I can test it while the current theme is live. Is there a "test drive" that I can do?
Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you for taking the time to read my noob post. I'm willing to pay for consulting if necessary.
Well, I searched the forum and I didn't find anything interesting, because I Just want Vanilla sync the users data with Joomla!. I don't want any Joomla! component or anything else.
And I want to know how is possible to translate Vanilla. I've looked at the source files and I didn't find anything interesting.
A website I'm developing is running wordpress, with (edited!) wp running in the root directory, and Vanilla in its own directory underneath that. The only integration I have done between the two is including the wordpress /wp-blog-header.php file to allow me to share the menus, header and footer.
Everything was working fine until I set a permalink structure in Wordpress (/%category%/%postname%/)
Doing that seems to prevent Vanilla's ajax get calls from working - for example clicking on the 'sign in' link fails (the lightbox opens but never loads the signin form)
Using Firebug, I can see that the ajax getting the following url was returning a 404, despite it working fine if I go straight to that URL /index.php/entry/?Target=discussions&DeliveryType=VIEW
Turning off Wordpress permalinks solves the problem, but isn't something I want to do (for SEO and usability reasons).
My understanding of permalinks is sketchy to say the least - is there a way to override what I've set in Wordpress for the Vanilla directory? Or another solution?
Seem to have a small problem with the date on the forum - if you post something today, instead of letting you know when it was posted as a time, it just says 'February 6th' which of course was yesterday!
I'm guessing it's not a problem with the server time being out, as it almost seems like the comments are getting yesterdays date when being posted, but today's date is right when you're browsing the forum, if that makes sense :S
Any ideas what it could be please? I couldn't find any in the settings :(
I have searched and tried but can't make the change to default to Categories. I've tried the addon Category Page First and had to reinstall to get it back OK (thrice).
I've searched the forum and get lost in CSS changes etc.
The "Default Page" addon seems to require a url more complex than www.page.com/vanilla/categories.php would be.