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There is no tutorial on that and the pager is quite complex, thow you do not need to do much to get it going. After you have set up a working pager, I recommend taking a closer look at the class.pagermodule.php to find out more about its possibilities.

The best way to get going is to look at a page where you can find a pager, e.g. one of the discussions lists (recent discussions, bookmarked, mine etc.) You can find that code in /applications/vanilla/controllers/class.discussionscontroller.php

Let's look at the mine() method, which is quite short, but I stripped out what is not necessary to get a working example:

   public function mine($page = 'p1') {
...
       // Set criteria & get discussions data
       list($offset, $limit) = offsetLimit($page, c('Vanilla.Discussions.PerPage', 30));
...
       $countDiscussions = $this->setData('CountDiscussions', $discussionModel->getCount($wheres));
...
       // Build a pager
       $pagerFactory = new Gdn_PagerFactory();
       $this->EventArguments['PagerType'] = 'MorePager';
...
       $this->Pager = $pagerFactory->getPager($this->EventArguments['PagerType'], $this);
       $this->Pager->MoreCode = 'More Discussions';
       $this->Pager->LessCode = 'Newer Discussions';
       $this->Pager->ClientID = 'Pager';
       $this->Pager->configure(
           $offset,
           $limit,
           $countDiscussions,
           'discussions/mine/%1$s'
       );

       $this->setData('_PagerUrl', 'discussions/mine/{Page}');
       $this->setData('_Page', $page);
       $this->setData('_Limit', $limit);
...
       // Deliver JSON data if necessary
       if ($this->_DeliveryType != DELIVERY_TYPE_ALL) {
           $this->setJson('LessRow', $this->Pager->toString('less'));
           $this->setJson('MoreRow', $this->Pager->toString('more'));
           $this->View = 'discussions';
       }
...
   }

The main element in there is the following block:

       $this->Pager->configure(
           $offset,
           $limit,
           $countDiscussions,
           'discussions/mine/%1$s'
       );

The pager module needs to be configured with those information: where does the current page starts (offset), how much elements does it show (limit), how much elements are there in total (countDiscussions) and where should the previous and next page links should point to.

But look at method code step by step:

   public function mine($page = 'p1') {

In your plugin this will most probably be

   public function pluginController_foo_create($sender, $args) {

The $args array will contain everything that comes after yourforum.com/plugin/foo/...

Therefore, if your url scheme for e.g. the third page should be /plugin/foo/p3, you should have the following code for getting the page for building the pager: $page = $args[0] ?? 'p1';

If your url scheme is /plugin/foo/bar/baz/p3, the required code would be $page = $args[2] ?? 'p1';

       list($offset, $limit) = offsetLimit($page, c('Vanilla.Discussions.PerPage', 30));

This line does a lot! You should look up the function offsetLimit in functions.general.php. What's happening here is that the variables $offset and $limit are filled based on the $page variable and the config value for Vanilla.Discussions.PerPage. I would encoure to make your view configurable in the same way.

       list($offset, $limit) = offsetLimit($page, Gdn::config('Plugins.FooBar.PerPage', 30));

And if it makes sense, you can directly use a Vanilla PerPage setting as default!

        list($offset, $limit) = offsetLimit(
           $page,
           Gdn::config(
               'Plugins.FooBar.PerPage',
                Gdn::config(
                    'Vanilla.Discussions.PerPage',
                    30
                )
            )
        );

The following lines in the snippet are split because that way a plugin author can influence the look and feel of the pager of the mine() method.

       $this->EventArguments['PagerType'] = 'MorePager';
...
       $this->Pager = $pagerFactory->getPager($this->EventArguments['PagerType'], $this);

You can condense it to this line

       $this->Pager = $pagerFactory->getPager('MorePager', $this);

By the way: in most cases when you look at Vanilla code and see $this, you will have to replace that with $sender (if you stick to Vanillas conventions)

Frankly spoken, I'm not sure if you need this block:

       $this->setData('_PagerUrl', 'discussions/mine/{Page}');
       $this->setData('_Page', $page);
       $this->setData('_Limit', $limit);

ANd you have to decide by yourself if that makes sense for you:

       // Deliver JSON data if necessary
       if ($this->_DeliveryType != DELIVERY_TYPE_ALL) {
           $this->setJson('LessRow', $this->Pager->toString('less'));
           $this->setJson('MoreRow', $this->Pager->toString('more'));
           $this->View = 'discussions';
       }

In your view, a simple PagerModule::write() should be sufficient.

Hello everyone,

For the forum I host, I needed to create a plugin that would allow for filtering searches, without the use of additional software (like Sphinx), as my server host does not support it. This lead to the creation of the FilterForumSearch plugin:

You can find the plugin here: https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/filteredforumsearch-plugin-2.0

The plugin supports the following filters:

• Category
• Q&A status
• Comment/Reply count
• Username

The plugin has no dependencies outside of Vanilla and the Q&A plugin. This allows it to work with Shared hosting plans and other server plans that otherwise wouldn't allow for filtered searching through additional software. The plugin works by using an SQL query to retrieve data based on the parameters passed in, using Vanilla's SQL interface to (hopefully) minimize SQL injection potential.

Hopefully this plugin will be helpful for others who are looking for search filters but cannot install additional software.

Motivation behind creation

One of the members of the forum I host mentioned that they would prefer additional search parameters/filters to make it easier to find if similar questions have already been answered by using the search page in Vanilla. To me, this was a reasonable request, so I set about finding a solution.

One of the admins on the forum suggested the SphinxSearch plugin, which would have worked great and provided everything we need. Unfortunately, I discovered that my server provider does not have Spinx support with the hosting plan I have bought, making this plugin unusable for the forum.

I found the CategorySearch plugin, which uses SQL queries to filter the search, which looked like exactly what I was looking for. However, the plugin didn't work with the version of Vanilla the forums is using, 2.8.3 currently. After trying to get it to work for a few hours with no result, which is probably due to my lack of PHP experience, I decided to rewrite the non-working parts of the plugin entirely, using a slightly different method than the original.

Having made this decision, I set about rewriting a good chunk of the plugin, using the CategorySearch plugin as a reference. After a couple days of work, testing, and debugging, I finally had a working plugin that filters searches using direct SQL queries.

After this, it was pointed out to me that using SQL queries directly could introduce security vulnerabilities, so I rewrote the plugin to use Vanilla's SQL interface instead and removed all direct SQL queries, hopefully removing and vulnerabilities I introduced through the plugin.

Once I had that working, I cleaned a few things up, changed the plugin info, and uploaded it both here and to the GitHub repository holding all of the modified plugins for the forum I'm hosting.

Special Thanks

Huge thanks to @R_J, the creator of the CategorySearch plugin! Using the plugin as a base was extremely helpful and greatly sped up the time it would have taken to write the plugin if I wrote it entirely from scratch.

Note

One major thing I am not sure about, is the PHP code I wrote for the plugin.

While I have SQL experience, I only have used PHP minimally, so the code may be poorly written. If someone with PHP/SQL experience does not mind looking at the plugin and it's code, I would highly appreciate it! I think the code is probably stable and secure enough for most cases, but I'm concerned that I might have missed something obvious.