Best Of
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.).

Re: Vanilla 2021.009 no categories found
Okay so wow, some huge revelations here and @R_J you are amazing with your help. Even though a brand new version of 2021.012 looked like it was working with String values returned form the database it was NOT working!! I WAS WRONG (I can admit when I am wrong) I didn't even notice certain thing were not there like my user Icon was not showing up, there was no way to log off... And after adding custom permissions they were not being followed as you suspected @R_J . So after trying to figure out WTF was going on with the string thing and talking to my hosting provider they said they have no servers running MySQL 8.0 so that was not an option. After doing research as to how others fixed this with the 5.7 version of MySQL I realized they kept saying what @R_J was saying was that you need to be using the MySQLnd driver. I have cPanel on my server and this option was checked and in a phpinfo() it said it was installed. What I did not realize is that it was not using it! you cannot use PDO MySQL &PDO MySQLnd at the same time (Obviously). Because my cPanel options for PHP settings are in alphabetical order I figured all these settings would be under P for PDO but fond this little reply from someone else in an article that mention cPanel has this setting under the N section for ND (go figure) So I disabled pdo_mysql and then enabled 'nd_pdo_mysql' & 'mysqlnd' once these settings took place. I ran my test code again and now it was returning INT values form the database. (YEAH). I also tested with @R_Js test plugin, it was now also returning INT values (Success). I loaded the site and everything is now functional!
To any users before you do the update please check using @R_Js plugin to see if your server is returning STRING values or INT values. If your database is returning STRING values you will have to fix this BEFORE upgrading. If the returned values are STRING then you will have to update to use mysqlnd. For every user that will be different based on your server for cPapnel do the following:
This will ensure you are using MySQLnd and then run the test plugin again and you shoudl see INT values returned. I hope this helps others. I am going to do the update again and see if I run into issues this time!

Vanilla 2021.011 is now available
Today marks the official release of Vanilla 2021.011.
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 2021.011! 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.).

Vanilla & Higher Logic - An Update!
Hey Everyone,
We meant to have something yesterday and I apologize for the delay. As you can imagine yesterday was a bit a big day for us, with lots of things going on. There was no intention to leave you out and I 100% understand the concern.
I can tell you we have spoken to the team at Higher Logic and Vanilla itself will continue to be maintained and we have no plans to discontinue our open source releases. I hope my words assure you, even if slightly delayed.
Thanks for all you do and the amazing communities you are building 🙂
Adrian

New Moderators
I'm happy to announce that there are two new moderators in the team: Bleistivt and Kaspar!
From my understanding you should never notice moderators: they will help keeping the forum free from spammers, maybe split up some discussions where it makes sense and that's it.
Nevertheless that requires some work and I'm thankful that Kaspar and Bleistivt dedicate some of their precious time for the benefit of this community 👏

Vanilla 2021.009 (formerly Vanilla 4.0) is now available
Today marks the official release of Vanilla 2021.009, the release formerly known as 4.0.
There have been some important changes to Vanilla since the last release announced here. They've been stated in the RC announcement posts, but I'll echo them here:
- Vanilla 2021.009 requires at least PHP 7.2. Future versions of Vanilla will require PHP 7.4+.
- MySQL 5.7+ is required, starting with Vanilla 2021.009.
- 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 to Vanilla 2021.009 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 the road from Vanilla 3.3 to Vanilla 2021.009:
Last, but not least, there's Vanilla 2021.009! 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.).
Yaga 2.1.0
Vanilla 3.3 or higher is required to use this plugin.
You can download a zipped version here:
https://vanillaskins.com/plugins.html#yaga
...or visit the github repository here:
https://github.com/bleistivt/yaga
For more info about this YAGA fork, read https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/37990
Release Notes
Reaction customization
Reactions can now be fully customized. You can use your own icons, SVG images or even Emoji!
Note that the .ReactSprite
class has been changed to .YagaReactSprite
as there is a naming clash with the default theme (keystone).
If you have been using the old reaction sprites without any kind of customization through CSS, you can ignore this change.
Otherwise, you will have to replace .ReactSprite
with .YagaReactSprite
in your custom stylesheet.
"Best Of..." performance
The performance and memory usage of the "best of" section has been drastically improved.
This also includes the profile/reactions pages. These are now fully paginated (not just "previous" & "next").
If you are upgrading you will have to run dba/counts (tick "Recalculate Reaction.Latest") once.
Next release
APIv2 integration is planned for the next update.
Once Vanilla 4.0 is released, I will also look into cross-supporting the bundled Reactions plugin (possibly supporting converting between both).
Vanilla 2021.003 RC2 is now available
Today, on the 16th anniversary of this community, we're introducing Vanilla 2021.003 RC2, which is the sequel to Vanilla 4.0 RC1.
This version number is sure to confuse some folks, so let me take a minute to explain. In an effort to streamline our OSS releases, we're going to try bringing their version numbers inline with what we use in our hosted product. Approximately once every two weeks, we crank out a new hosted release and version it based on the current year along with its sequence in the releases for that year. Instead of trying to translate between the two versions (e.g. 4.0 might internally mean 2021.003, while 4.0.1 could internally be 2021.004), they'll each have the same versioning.
You've also probably noticed this is the second release candidate for the new version. The plan is to try this out for a couple weeks and, barring any reports of catastrophic breakage from the community, formally releasing it as the next official version of Vanilla.
Same as RC1, there are some warnings and considerations I'll repeat here:
- This is an RC (release candidate). It is not intended for use in production environments. It is pre-release software. Install it in some kind of sandbox and go nuts, but avoid overwriting your existing Vanilla installs. Once we're confident in Vanilla 2021.003 on open-source community sites, we'll drop a production-ready release. Future updates probably won't need an RC cycle, but given the length of time since the last release, it seems prudent.
- Vanilla 2021.003 requires at least PHP 7.2. It's also the last version that'll support PHP 7.2. Future versions of Vanilla will require PHP 7.4+.
- MySQL 5.7+ is required, starting with Vanilla 2021.003.
- 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 to Vanilla 2021.003 will result in your full-text database indexes being lost.
If you're still feeling bold, you can checkout the changelog and download Vanilla 2021.003 RC2 over on GitHub. You'll find a pre-built package under "Assets".