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Couple questions...

AmerikasMostWantedAmerikasMostWanted
edited December 2010 in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8
NEVERMIND GUYS, THANKS FOR ALL THE HELP BUT DECIDED TO CHANGE FORUM SOFTWARE :)

Question 1:
Is it possible to have a forum home screen similar to Vbulletin forums? Like having the categories and forums shown on the homepage instead of latest topics? Makes it all a bit more effective.

Question 2:
Is it possible to integrate a shoutbox into Vanilla? Preferably a free one, is there a plugin or something similar available?

Question 3:
Is there a reputation system and a ''thanks'' button function available?

Question 4:
Is there a ''theme changer''? So that people can pick themes, I'd like to create another darker theme for my members to use :)

Well that was it for now...

Thanks in advance,
Nima

Comments

  • majogamajoga
    Sorry, I don't have any answers for you. I just want to say - My Lord that's beautiful. Nice job.
  • 2PacChannel2PacChannel
    Damn, forgot my password to my other account already xD @Majoga, thanks man! Really appreciate it. Vanilla is SUCH a good forum to customize things in it. Goes really easy, unlike Vbulletin where you basically have to pay 500-1000$ to get someone to make you a dope skin.

    Only problems I have with it so far are those 4 things I mentioned, if they can be implemented that'd really make it amazing :)
  • veganovegano
    to 3:

    May this works: http://vanillaforums.org/addon/lajkuj-plugin
    As my forum doesn't have nice URL I wasn't able to test it out - but maybe you could rename "like" to "thank" or something.

  • judgejjudgej ✭
    edited December 2010
    On question 1, it should be possible to any kind of home page you like with some controller code to fetch the data and a view to display it. I'm not sure how the default page would be directed towards the custom controller though, to perhaps someone else can chime in there.

    One thing that may be difficult is the way the categories are handled. Vanilla basically has one level of category, and they cannot be nested. You can define "parent" categories, but they just act as placeholders in the side menu, and little more than that. A custom controller could use the parent categories for grouping categories on the home page, but without a proper hierarchy, the grouping and drill-down options are limited.

    One other thing the parent categories do, is put an invalid → entity in the title of the RSS feed, which makes most RSS readers fall over. Your child category RSS feeds all look like blank pages in Firefox because of this, and I know SimplePie falls over badly when attempting to read Vanilla RSS feeds that have not been fixed. I've raised this as a bug. My workaround is to replace "→" with a > in the relevant controller (just do a search for it). For me, those characters are a design issue and belong in the views, not the controllers, but that's the way it is.

    Looks a great theme though :-)
  • 2PacChannel2PacChannel
    @Vegano
    Thanks I will try that out! :)

    @Judgej
    Whoa, that's like chinese to me haha. So is ''question 1'' possible to do or not? It would be a great plugin to cause it's basically the only real problem I think Vanilla has. The way it is right now is just not very great when you have alot of different subforums.
  • judgejjudgej ✭
    edited December 2010
    Hehe - okay, in short: yes it could be done, but it would have to be a plugin. There may be a way to do it in the theme alone, but that would be a bit hacky, and besides, it would make a great plugin.

    The thing about the RSS feed is this: can you actually see the contents of this RSS feed?
  • 2PacChannel2PacChannel
    edited December 2010
    Hehe - okay, in short: yes it could be done, but it would have to be a plugin. There may be a way to do it in the theme alone, but that would be a bit hacky, and besides, it would make a great plugin.

    The thing about the RSS feed is this: can you actually see the contents of this RSS feed?
    @Judgej
    Hmm, well, I hope someone makes a plug-in for it then :D Seems like it has been quiet for some while around the Vanilla plugin making scene unfortunatly.

    And yes, I can see the contents of that RSS feed. I see all the text that is in that category, is that a good or bad thing?
  • judgejjudgej ✭
    edited December 2010
    Yes, it is good that you can see that RSS feed nicely formatted. I just see a blank page in Firefox.

    Plugin develoment seems to come in bursts - nothing for ages, then a bunch of activity. The project is missing a decent development wiki IMO, because there is so much undocumented, and once you have spent the time learning how to do something, there is nowhere to share it in a useful way. That is not a good way to build and maintain a development community.
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