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The plugin setup screen has this line on the very top: "Click here for the Customization Guide."

I highly suggest you read it thoroughly.

Within this short guide you will see this paragraph:

"The side panel is only visible when there are other discussions that share the same topic as the current discussion. Thus, for best results you should first customize the topic ​construction options ​(see below) ​and then initialize the discussion table using the update option​ (also see below)​ before expecting to see side panel results."

Also, the plugin setup screen has a section at the bottom that is dedicated to "Table Update-Adding topics to previously saved discussions"

To the right of that section there is a box with these note:

Titles are attached to discussions when the discussion body (not comments) are saved.
You can use this Table Update process to attach titles to discussions without topics (e.g. discussions created before plugin activation) or to reconstruct the topics when you change some of the settings.

I highly suggest you read everything and experiment with the various options.

Good luck!

I havn't had a closer look at what is possible, but based on this few lines I'm pretty sure you can easily take influence on the "absoluteFileDestination"

You would have to find out the current user, add the users id as a path and make sure that file a) could be saved and b) doesn't overwrite an existing file.
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I'm not convinced that I would go that way, but if you think it would be good for you, I will support creating that plugin.

Get some basics about php, read the docs about plugins and as soon as you have a skeleton plugin up and running and have a basic understanding of what the following code might do, come back and ask for more details:

public function base_beforeSaveUploads_handler($sender, $args) {
    $userID = Gdn::session->UserID;
    // Find out what $args['AbsoluteFileDestination'] looks like
    // in order to knw how to parse it.
    // Insert $userID."/" before the filename
    // Check if that file exists
    // If no: try to write that file
    // If yes: create a new file name and loop back
    // Change $args['AbsoluteFileDestination']
    // That's it!
}

It would be helpful if you can tell us which page should be your home page. I don't understand "default article page". How does your url look like?

But in principle you wouldn't need to tell. If you open up the "default article page" and your url looks like "YourForum.com/articles", go to "YourForum.com/dashboard/routes/edit/DefaultController", leave Type as "Internal" and change Target to "articles".

That's it.

It is also possible to show a dedicated page with all the tags on it, but I wouldn't know of a way to present them so that it is not a boring list. But depending on the way you use tags, it might not be so useless as I think.

Creating a plugin that shows such a list would be really easy by the way. If you are interested and have a little knowledge I could guide you.
If you decide to take the challenge, start with this plugin: https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/howtovanillapage-plugin
Customize it a little bit so that it shows texts which suit your needs and in the next steps I would show you how to

• get all the tags
• loop through them in a view

It would really be a good beginner plugin.

Short answer: yes

Long answer: you can try to find out what have been done during the update process by working your way through the pull request.
I don't think you would be able to simply "see" what is needed but you would have to try a lot and you would need testing and debugging.
I cannot imagine that someone without much knowledge of php is able to do so.

But nevertheless you can try!

Look at a) the error message above "Call to undefined method PHPMailer::throwExceptions()" and b) the file VanillaMailer in the PR above.

You see that there is a method in the file which looks exactly like the missing method. That might be helpful...

In the pull request, there are 9 files changes: the composer files and the files in library/vendors/phpmailer shouldn't be important here. I would guess that all changes in Vanilla has taken place in the other 3 files. 3 files doesn't sound scary at all.

The 3 files left are:
applications/dashboard/models/class.activitymodel.php
library/Vanilla/VanillaMailer.php
library/core/class.email.php

Before we proceed: backup them!

There are two approaches you could take:

Replace and see what is happening!

Download Vanilla 2.4 beta, replace both files in the library subfolders, but do the changes to the ActivityModel manually.

Test, test, test...

Reproduce the pull request

Change the above three files like they have been changed in the pull request. Be sure not to miss something, only start testing after you are sure you have changed all three files

Test, test, test...

I'm quite optimistic that this should work. Please report back.

You should add a translation for that in your locale file:

1. If it is not already existing, create a file /conf/locale.php
2. Make sure the first line is <?php
3. Add $Definition['ValidateStrength'] = 'your translation here'; to the end of that file.

The original message is "The supplied %s is too weak. Try using a stronger password and use the strength meter as a guide."
%s will be replace with the translation for "password" in this case (that's only a guess). Think of it as a placeholder and use it like that in your own translation.

If you are new to PHP, HTML and CSS you are lost, sorry.

If you are only new to Vanilla, that should be doable, though a lot of work. You can create a custom page: https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/howtovanillapage-plugin

Afterwards you would have to gather the info that you would like to present. You need an exact imagination of what you would like to present: e.g. what is a "hot discussion"?
As soon as you now what you are looking for, you could ask and I would happily support you to find the best way to get to that information.

But like I said: if you are a newbie to development as such, it would be challenging...