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Vanilla 2022.024 Open Source Release - Built From Source + Broken Admin Dashboard FIXED!
Merry Christmas all! :)
Here is the latest available Vanilla release (2022.024) built from source code, with the broken / blank Dashboard issue from some of the most current releases also fixed up. ☺️
Note: While I messed about and managed to get 2021.009 working on PHP 8, I have not had success with that yet for 2022.024, so this build will require PHP 7.4 still - but hey I figure that this is still an improvement on the last 2021.009 release!
TIP: Head over to the "Labs" page in Settings (/settings/labs) and enable the new Layout Editor, then go to the Appearance tab to customize the site layout :D
Ready to move to Flarum? I might be able to help
A couple weeks ago I did the first full community migration from Vanilla to Flarum. I'm willing to do a few more for free to work out further issues with the forum migration software I'm building.
Criteria:
- non-commercial community
- less than 5 million posts
- no hate speech on site
- timeline is 1-3 months (estimate only, depends on my weekend availability)
Caveats:
I'm not currently able to provide troubleshooting assistance for setting up a new Flarum site. You will need to set it up ahead of time with the appropriate plugins (I will provide a list of standard extensions to use if you want things like badges or private messages to transfer).
You will be responsible for moving files (uploads and avatars) separately. I'll provide instructions for that as well.
You will also be responsible for any redirects you wish to set up. Happy to provide advice from what I know, but that's not something I'm willing to set up for you today.
Workflow:
- You do a SQL export, zip it, and send me a link via a file service like Dropbox.
- We'll discuss how to handle special edge cases in your forum and I'll iterate on it for a bit.
- I'll provide 1 test SQL export for you to evaluate and provide feedback on issues you find.
- I will fix issues I'm willing and able to, then we'll pick a day for the final migration.
- Expect a full day of downtime. When ready, put your site into maintenance mode and send the final SQL export the same way. I'll return the finish product the same way.
I will provide a UTF-8 export regardless of what you initially provide. It's important you FORCE the test & final import to use UTF-8 encoding rather than letting the database tool detect and set it itself.
Security:
I'm willing to sign a very, very narrow NDA about data privacy if you require it. However, also note I have far more data security experience than most folks running forums (I drove application-level security efforts at Vanilla Forums Inc for most of its existence), so rest assured your data will only exist on encrypted drives and/or behind 2-factor authentication on my side, and I have no interest in it beyond improving & testing the migration software. The only time it's exposed is while we're transmitting it to each other via Dropbox link. Do not upload a data export to this site.
Interested? Fill out this form: https://forms.gle/rdB1SmgGNPMU6rML6
Private messages on this site are fine, or email me ( linc at icrontic.com ) with questions. Also happy to answer questions about DIY migrations or otherwise talk shop about communities.

Re: Where do we go now ?
I've gone ahead and built a release from the available sources released 4 days ago(!) hidden in the GitHub branches: https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla/tree/release/2022.021
These releases have been tagged but have not included a built package for some time. I will be testing this for PHP8 compatibility tomorrow.
Re: Where do we go now ?
While it's long tempted me to continue Vanilla, there's a difficult challenge. If you do a "community edition", you have no input on the roadmap. You're just a silent steward tied to whatever the company decides. I agree there's no reasonable hope for collaboration with them at this point. If you do a fork, now you're signing up for a world of maintenance, and you'd have to rebuild the open source developer community to about 2x its highest point to make that sustainable. Having a bespoke framework underpinning the whole thing is a very large maintenance liability and it hasn't kept pace with development trends.
Flarum has a strong development community and has more than adequate feature parity, imo. It's more challenging to install & update for non-developers, but they're working on that with reasonable priority. My biggest quibble with it is the Javascript-heavy UI, but I have plans to address that and most other folks don't share my concern. My preferred path forward for building community software is do it downstream from Flarum, using it as a dependency to make my own system, rather than building something from scratch again.
I just spent a year of my free time building a migration tool from Vanilla to Flarum, so I feel pretty strongly about it. For more info on moving to Flarum if that's your choice, see here: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39195/ready-to-move-to-flarum-i-might-be-able-to-help#latest
I built that tool with the ability to do different output/target plugins for other platforms, so it's fully extensible. That said, making target plugins is more challenging than source plugins because of the peculiarities of each new platform.
It's sad to say as I was using it since 2012
I just hit the 13th anniversary of my first code contribution to Vanilla this month. A bittersweet reminder these days, indeed. I really thought it could become the ubiquitous community software of the web, but the writing's been on the wall a long, long time now.

Re: Vanilla version 2021.009 is the latest stable release as of now
I tried 2021.025 on my forum in production (i'm silly).
I updated my 2021.012 version and i had only a php warning.
version.json file is missing in root directory, so the assets in source code of each page look like
<script src="/discussions/js/library/jquery.js?v=unknown" static="1" defer="defer"></script>
and in the dashboard bottom right, i had version: unknown
Forum works fine but i want to correct this, so, I upload on my website a version.json file with this (found in the vanilla github repo, i changed only 2022.006 to 2021.025)
{ "x-version-scheme": "{Release version}-{? SNAPSHOT if it's a dev build}", "version": "2021.025" }
now everythings seems ok. I will check my logs to see if i have others errors.
I tried to pass to PHP8 but had a 500 error. I have to check what is failing.
Thank you @R_J and others for your work for this community

Vanilla version 2021.009 is the latest stable release as of now
Please ignore all the buggy releases after Vanilla 2021.009.
It's important to note the difference between "release" and "version" here: while you might be able to build a completely fine running forum from the sources on GitHub if you are a developer, there hasn't been any release which wasn't usable out of the box since release 2021.009.
I've compiled a 2021.025 version and if you like to give that a try and report your experiences back, we might recommend that until a new release will be published officially.

Re: Vanilla version 2021.009 is the latest stable release as of now
I don't believe you'll ever see another pre-built copy of Vanilla distributed by the company. I'd love to be wrong, I just don't see it happening, knowing what I do about internal politics there.
I do expect to continue seeing automated unbuilt "releases" like you see on GitHub currently, because those are serving some of their enterprise customers via the Docker installation.
I'm willing to answer questions for any senior members here that want to build, vet, and update the latest version in the addon directory. Unfortunately I'm not willing to lead that process myself any longer. I kept those releases going by my own force of will for more than 5 years and I'm tapped out.

Re: Vanilla 2021.012 is now available
There are plans for getting on a more consistent release cadence. I'm hoping to have an announcement on this tomorrow.
Appreciate everyone's patience!

Vanilla 2021.012 is now available
Today marks the official release of Vanilla 2021.012.
There have been some important changes to Vanilla since Vanilla 3.0. They've been stated in recent release posts, but I'll echo them here:
- Vanilla requires at least PHP 7.2. Future versions of Vanilla will require PHP 7.4+.
- MySQL 5.7+ is required.
- Full-text indexes have been disabled by default. You can enable them by adding a
Database.FullTextIndexing
key to your config and setting it totrue
. Failure to do this before upgrading will result in your full-text database indexes being lost.
There's a long change log of fixes and features, spread across the RCs and recent "gold" releases. If you're curious, you can follow them:
Last, but not least, there's Vanilla 2021.012! You can checkout its change log and download the pre-built package, over on GitHub.
This is a major upgrade from 3.3. Please follow our upgrading guide. If you experience any issues, please post specifics (exact error messages, screenshots, etc.).
