Best Of

Hey, I am just looking into this now for my forum ozvolvo.org, I will give nitro-porter a go!

I've looked at the config for that parser and cannot figure out what's going on here. Some HTML is parsing for you and some isn't. It looks like an h1 (with a class), div (with a class), and br all won't parse. But the div and br are definitely allowlisted in the formatter. I dunno why h1 isn't but I could fix that easy enough. I suspect this is going to take me a bit longer to sort out.

I also thought about this, surely with some of the big enterprise companies that are on Vanilla Cloud they wouldn't be left on 7.4 when it goes EOL?

I've seen a few things on GitHub which suggests/confirms that PHP 8 is being worked on.

I'll keep my fingers crossed!

Found this on GitHub for info:-

If you have a fairly standard community setup & your community can tolerate a complete UI changeover, then you should probably switch to Flarum, yes.

But there are communities that have build up deep technical integrations into other CMSes, Apps, APIs etc. with lots of custom code and entire applications based on Garden/Vanilla. These won't be able to make such a switch. @phreak and I are running/managing some of those and we are commited to supporting them for the forseeable future. If you are interested in cooperating on patches and maybe even a helping on a fork, please contact us!

We can not make any promise that there will be a "community edition" with PHP8 support ready next month, but I since Vanilla Cloud will want to run on PHP8 themselves, I suspect the newer GitHub release branches may already be compatible albeit unbuilt.

I tried it and it's not ok.

As the vanilla post is in wysiwyg (html) format, i think you have to convert to markdown and after to s9 textformat it with markdown

here is the result in database with nitroporter 3.1.2

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.

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.

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.