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My Vanilla Wishlist

hyphyhyphy New
edited June 2011 in Feedback
I'd love to see future Vanilla releases include the following:
  • Better Announcement functionality. Currently, if an announcement is created in a category it will be automatically 'stuck' to the top of the All Discussions page. Instead, it would be preferable if Announcements were only stuck to the top of their specific categories. It makes it rather confusing and cluttered when categories have multiple announcements that don't apply to other categories or all discussions but are still shown under All Discussions.


    A "Global Announcement" feature could be implemented (similar to what is currently in phpBB) and only those Global Announcements would be displayed under All Discussions.
  • Enhanced ability to display messages to only logged in users or only logged out users or both. This is useful for placing "push" messages to logged out users/guests to entice them to register. I guess this could be based around permissions too - Members don't see a certain message while Guests do.
  • Move discussion feature. Instead of having to enter the edit page and (if the LastEdited plugin is installed) have edit information displayed, there should be a feature that allows you to easily move the discussion outside of the edit page. A link to this feature could be placed before the Delete Discussion link.
  • CMS System with ability to add/edit static pages as well as adjust and reorganize the main menu. Further functionality could be added to edit the footer and header width and content as well.
  • Better search functionality. I understand that we are using MySQL title search and that it was chosen for performance reasons, but an advanced searching function or enhanced search variables (quotes/-/author/etc) would be great.
  • Themes! To be brutally honest, none of the themes currently available for Vanilla - aside from the default theme and Swiss - are very attractive. The Vanilla development team should consider creating premium themes. This would be an excellent way for you all to show off your design skills to an even greater extent and then create a profit margin from selling those themes to Vanilla users that could go back to fund further development. Come on guys! $$$
  • Better documentation. Pretty self-explanatory. Vanilla will only have so far of a future and so wide a reach if it's documentation doesn't grow alongside its popularity. I'm pretty well versed in php coding and am still a bit befuddled by some of the coding elements in Vanilla. More extensive documentation would be extremely helpful - possibly considering developing a similar Codex like Wordpress' and allow user contributions to ensure its growth.
Overall, great software you've all developed. There's always going to be room to grow and I am sure that Vanilla will continue to see its popularity grow.

Comments

  • I totally agree on the announcement feature, like making an announcement with the forum rules. It doesnt look to nice. But the rest of the forums look great. much nicer then other open source software I've tried.
  • Also wish we could add infractions to members, for profanity, etc.
  • hyphyhyphy New
    edited June 2011
    I think 2.0.18b2 offers some form of user infractions under the new moderator tools as it was mentioned in the beta announcement on here (check the Announcements). I did a little testing in the beta environment last night but couldn't find anything related to infractions though… Maybe it will be more present in the upcoming b3 release or stable release?
  • Upon my upgrade here are a few things my users are missing:

    Search - the Vanilla 1 search seemed much better. The result of the current search are pretty poor. I started to play around with Vanoogle - but at the moment the only result I get back is the URL of the forum. I'm just not sure if paying for their advanced search feature will yield better resuluts.

    Different color for unread threads - We have colors for own, new message and read. Seems like it would be easy to put a check to see if unread and total posts equal - and trigger a unread css tag.

    Spell check - Not sure is this is in development, in the meantime I've been trying to encourage my users to use Firefox or another browser which have it built in.

    Participated discussions plug-in isn't working for me - I started another thread in regards to this.



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