Best Of
Re: How to change the order of custom profile fields
I think they display in the order they're in in your config. If you VERY CAREFULY reorder those lines it might do it.
Linc
Re: How do I insert an image into a Discussion
You do not have "pretty urls" enabled. But that's a vanilla requirement. You should have a .htaccess.dist file in your forum root. Rename it to .htaccess and reload the forums home page. It should appear without the &p= stuff
R_J
New Embed System (Preview & Information)
One of my favourite parts of the Vanilla is the ability to embed external content. Unfortunately until now, it has been very difficult to create custom embeds with any amount of complexity.
In the last few weeks the team has been working on finalizing our new pluggable embed system. I held it back from the 3.1 release due to a need for additional testing, but it is available for testing on the master branch of Vanilla.
Our initial documentation is written, but it will be fleshed out significantly in time for the next release. In case anyone wants to start playing with it, here it is.
Docs
PHP CodeBase & Builtin Embeds
Frontend CodeBase & Builtin Embeds
Re: Howdy Stranger and bottom description location!
You can get to France from the UK using the Eurostar train service.
You can also swim there.
They are both methods that achieve the end goal, but I'd only advise using one of them.
whu606
How to add a slideshow to your page with the Pockets plugin
Before you even start: you know that slideshows are awfully annoying? Nobody likes them. But if you want to add one to your forum, you can follow this description.
You all know what a slideshow is but how does it work? There are either JavaScript or CSS only solutions available. Which one you prefer doesn't matter for the next steps. We need to be able to insert CSS as well as JavaScript to the page, but we do not need to write a plugin or a custom theme for that.
Vanilla ships with a very handy plugin called "Pockets":
Administrators may add raw HTML to various places on the site. This plugin is very powerful, but can easily break your site if you make a mistake.
Powerful but dangerous, okay, we'll take care...
With the pockets plugin we can insert code snippets to our forum so let's enable the plugin - simply enabling it cannot break our forum and will not change the look or it's behaviour, so no need to be cautious during this step. Go to yourforum.com/dashboard/settings/plugins and enable the Pockets plugin. Right after that the link to the settings appear and we head on to look at that by clicking on it.
The plugin allows a test mode for new pockets, so we can try out some things without frightening our users.
If you have hit the "Add Pocket" button which is available in the heading row, a new screen pops up where we can enter some information. First press the toggle button that you want to Enable this pocket - again: be careful what you do on a live installation!
Give it a good Name like "Slider" or even better, if you plan to use it in the header of your forum and consider to annoy your users with more than one slider call it "Header Slider".
Fill in the Body with a placeholder like "Hello pocket world" for now. We will come back to that later on.
Take a look at the available options of the Page dropdown. I choose "discussions" here, but you could take whatever you like. CSS from your main forum and from the dashboard differs, so I would suggest not to use "dashboard" for now.
Under Location start with Content and test later on what else is possible.
The option "Repeat" allows many nice settings, but since we want our slider to be above the content, simply leave it on "Before"
There is nothing to do right now on the "Conditions" row. Take a look at the options later on and decide if some of those settings make sense for you.
The last thing to do before saving our new pocket is to enable "Test Mode", so that only you will see the test pocket.
After you have saved this, visit your page and you see a very decent "My pocket world" beneath your forum banner. Now, let's turn that into a fancy slideshow!
Well, I do not know how to create a slideshow, sorry. But I know where to find some scripts. A slideshow is also called a slider or a carousel so browsing through this will show something suitable:
In reasonable time I didn't found a script which fulfilled all of my criteria, but I found that nice little piece of work:
A vanilla 😎 js solution was what I was looking for. As a preparation, download the files https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zoltantothcom/vanilla-js-carousel/master/dist/vanilla-js-carousel.css and https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zoltantothcom/vanilla-js-carousel/master/dist/vanilla-js-carousel.min.js and save them to your /uploads folder
So we said we need some CSS, some JavaScript and we will need our images. Let's start with adding the html markup for the images into our pockets Body input box
<div class="js-Carousel" id="header-slideshow"> <ul> <li><img src="https://unsplash.it/600/200?random=1"></li> <li><img src="https://unsplash.it/600/200?random=2"></li> <li><img src="https://unsplash.it/600/200?random=3"></li> <li><img src="https://unsplash.it/600/200?random=4"></li> <li><img src="https://unsplash.it/600/200?random=5"></li> </ul> </div>
Add the style and script to it like that:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="uploads/vanilla-js-carousel.css" /> <script src="uploads/vanilla-js-carousel.min.js"></script>
Now we only have to create a carousel/slideshow from our html markup:
<script>
var carousel = new Carousel({
elem: 'header-slideshow',
dots: true,
arrows: true,
buttons: true,
autoplay: true,
infinite: true
});
</script>
You can find more about the options used here on the GitHub page of the carousel script. Save that, go to your discussions page and you will find your nice new slider!
If you are happy with what you see and want to present it to your users, don't forget to go and edit the pocket a last time and disable the last toggle "Test Mode" so that all of your users can see that slider.
R_J
Corona-Pandemic - Free plugins for social communities
Hi all,
We from VanillaSkins.com would like to give out our paid plugins to communities who are dealing with topics that are relevant for social stability.
The current corona pandemic is spreading rapidly in Europe. It already affects major industries and not only airports and local shops are ordered to shut down, also critical infrastructure like hospitals and organizations experience disorders. Reports are coming in that internet infrastructure like MS teams, Zoom or Discord are down repeatedly.
Due to the fact that forums like Vanillaforums OS are silos of experience and opinions and can relatively easily be setup on smaller infrastructure, we are offering our paid plugins for free to communities that are directly connected to important parts of our lives and society.
So if you run a community on psychological health, or you manage a forum of an NGO dealing with climate change, a forum on teaching children who can't go to school or you are a part of farmers collective exchanging growth cycles of crops... please contact me if any of our plugins would provide help to your community.
This shall not be empty words seen as a marketing opportunity. Problems surrounding the corona virus got pretty real in the last days events in Europe. I myself manage multiple pregnancy and birth communities and expecting mothers are afraid to go to the hospitals, fathers are not let into delivery rooms and birth clinics are closing. As mothers are asking for home birth opportunities we currently connect midwifes specialized in that field with them. So probably there is an opportunity for your community to help in this situation too. Think about it.
Best regards and keep save,
phreak
phreak
YAGA for Vanilla 3.2 and up
I just wanted to let you know that I've been maintaining a fork of YAGA (Yet Another Gamification Application) as a plugin for some time now.
It mostly features performance improvements and modern admin pages:
All of the original credit for the application goes to @hgtonight, who created it of course.
Why a fork?
Most of the functional improvements of this fork have been suggested (and some of them merged) in the original repo.
See https://github.com/hgtonight/Application-Yaga/pulls
With the way Vanilla has changed in recent years however, the Yaga application was lagging behind a little, so I maintained a (previously) private fork that went beyond a simple change that could be reasonably submitted as pull requests:
- Change the application to a plugin. Plugins have had the same power as applications for some time now and are the preferred way to extend Vanilla.
- New table names. All table names have been prefixed with "Yaga" to prevent future name clashes. There is already a GDN_reaction that has made Yaga incompatible on case-insensitive systems.
- Update all files to the coding style introduced in may 2015 (4 space indents, lowercase function & variable naming).
Thanks go to @pioc34 for some of the fixes I took from his fork & issue reports and @phreak for sponsoring many bug fixes & hosting the fork.
You can download a zipped version here:
https://vanillaskins.com/plugins.html#yaga
...or visit the github repository here:
https://github.com/bleistivt/yaga
I intend to keep this fork updated, as I use it myself. You are free to report issues or submit pull requests of course.
I am happy to give any developer here wanting to contribute write access to the repo.
2020 OSS Roadmap plans
I did one of these ~6 months ago and I'd like to followup on it and give out some additional roadmap context.
How'd we stick to our previous roadmap
Accomplished Goals
- Shipped new Embed System. (Documentation)
- Alt-text for images in Rich Editor.
- Emptied the Security Backlog (Over 300 security fixes since launching our HackerOne program!)
- Testing Pull Requests on CircleCI. (CircleCI)
- Improved automated testing - Code Coverage reporting & Visual regression testing.
- Refactored the text formatting pipeline (
Gdn_Formatis mostly deprecated. seeFormatService, andDateTimeFormatterfor new methods. ) - Splitting the frontend into different independant packages. (See
/packagesdirectory).
Still In Progress
- New Controllers & Routing. The new structure has matured significantly as we've worked on new projects, and documentation is forthcoming.
- Rich Editor mobile improvements.
Abandoned
- Builtin Docker Images - I was working on this personally and got burnt-out of it before I could get it polished enough for code review. Unfortunately I don't have much motivation for it. It looks like the community is starting to take it up though. I'm available for questions of anyone working on projects like this.
New Roadmap Objectives
Warning: These notes are not a guarantee of any particular version number or release date. It just represents some of our development goals.
Complete the 4.0 release
The 4.0 release is currently in progress. Main improvements will include:
- New Base Theme & New theming system.
- Hero Image plugin no longer a plugin. Instead it is built-in to core.
- 100s of bug-fixes
- Performance improvements.
- New PHP version requirements.
Documentation Overhaul
As we move our developer documentation over to it's new home in our Success Knowledge Base, we are updating outdated articles, adding new ones, and moving some new technical documentation from our internal documentation to become public.
Items that are set to receive new documentation:
I'll link the documentation here as it becomes available.
- New Controllers & Routing.
- Using Twig for Views.
- Using React for Views.
- Using the new Theming system.
- Using the new FormatService.
- Advanced custom embeds for Rich Editor.
- Improved local installation instructions.
- i18n & Localization.
- New Model Class & Pipelines.
- Dependency Injection.
- New Javascript & Style loading for addons.
As we write these we will primarily looking to provide "quickstart" guides with code examples. For for more technical understanding it's best to look at the key source code files, which will be linked at the bottom of documentation, where possible.
Re: Vanilla 3.3 is now available
Thank you big time to @R_J for guiding me though a three week journey to upgrade my site from 2.1 to 3.3. The guidance I received was very much needed and Vanilla is lucky to have such a talent.
As the new admin, I will be keeping the site updated as to now have the issues I have faced in this process.
TheSage
Running vanilla from docker in production
I've been using Vanilla for about 5 years, and have developed a maintenance process along the way that has broken down. My goal was to version control our setup (customisations, theme, plugins), and allow for automated deployments like the rest of our stack. I did this by forking the repo and adding to it: for plugins that were on GitHub, I added them as submodules; when they weren't on GitHub, I added their contents to our repo.
This worked for the most part, but upgrading the forums was always a bit of a pain, as we had to rebase and deal with any merge conflicts. We now have a huge number of merge conflicts, to the point that I'd like to start over and make a better setup.
The goal is to create a version controlled forum setup, with reproducible builds, that can run on an ephemeral filesystem (even heroku) so we can load balance it and even blow it away and reconstruct it if necessary. The twelve-factor app provides some background and general principles for this.
To do this, I figure I'll need to:
- Start from a specific Vanilla release: either a distributed package (zip) or the GitHub codebase (in which case I'd need to run composer).
- Fill in
config.phpwith settings and secrets, without putting secrets into version control. - Pull in our theme, either from a separate git repo or from a directory within this repo, and move it to the
themesdirectory of the Vanilla codebase. - Do the same for 10+ plugins, some of which are on GitHub, others which are just .zip files on the addons website.
- Set
conf,cache, anduploadsto be writable by PHP. - Somehow make
uploadsa separate volume (like S3) so it can be shared across multiple instances and can persist (even be backed up).
I've started implementing this in a Dockerfile. You can see my progress so far at this repo.
Where I need help
1. config.php
I'm having some trouble with config.php because Vanilla writes to it when an admin makes a change in the admin dashboard: it replaces getenv(...) with the plaintext value. Therefore, if you want to commit any changes made in the dashboard back to source control (say, by mounting config.php as a volume and then making the changes), you'd be committing secrets unless you remember to go back in and change them back to getenv . Solutions to this I've thought of so far are: (a) make it read-only, so the application cannot change it, or (b) consider it a secrets file, outside of source control. But then how would you do an automated deployment? Is there a way to stop Vanilla from writing to config.php ? I would think the database would be better suited for some of these settings, no?
2. Pulling in the theme and plugins
The simplest approach here is for the Dockerfile to just curl and unzip the theme and plugins. I can either put them in the appropriate place in the Vanilla codebase, or symlink them; it doesn't make much difference, I don't think. But it starts to feel like the job of a dependency manager. I could use composer here, but I'd have to either move the installed directory or symlink it to the appropriate place, and I don't think composer can do that, can it? Does anything else come to mind here?
Let me know if there's been any prior work on this, or if anyone wants to collaborate. I'm sure there's ways we can make the repo generic.
