Multiple Active Themes (Embedded in Wordpress and Facebook)

Homebrew_Korea

I am about to bite the bullet and pay to have my PHPBB forum ported over to Vanilla and am really excited to do so, but I have a few concerns regarding themes.

I plan on embedding the forum into Wordpress, which under testing at the moment works perfect with the theme set as 'Embed Friendly'. Things also seem to work well on my phone as the mobile theme is automatically displaying.

I also want to embed the forums on my company's Facebook page, but this is where the issue arises....the facebook frame is too narrow for the 'embed friendly' theme. I have read in the Documentation to disable the right hand column when embedding in Facebook, but then I lose it on the Wordpress embed as well which is a problem.

So my question is, how can I have the 'Embed Friendly' theme displayed via Wordpress and a 'Embed Friendly - minus sidebar' theme on Facebook? I'm a bit of a coding dummy, so bare with me on that side of things.

Cheers.

sahotataran

well you might need some javascript for the best option that changes the style sheets as per the available width. or use some CSS media queries.

http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/152339#Comment_152339

barnsy

Am also interested in embedding in Facebook.

I've read the instructions about enabling the 'embed friendly' theme, but does this mean that the forum will be embedded within Wordpress also?

Is it to possible to embed a vanilla forum within Facebook, but still have a regular working theme active within Wordpress (ie not embedded)?

Cheers!

sahotataran

well you might need some javascript for the best option that changes the style sheets as per the available width. or use some CSS media queries.

http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/152339#Comment_152339

422

Yer js and css to switch based on referring domain me thinks

barnsy

@sahotataran @422 thank you both for your replies.

I've checked out that thread you pointed me to and it appears parallel vanilla installs with two different themes may be the solution I'm looking for.

Again, thanks!

Homebrew_Korea

Cheers for that. The jsswitcher looks like it might work but is unfortunately above my level of ability, programming wise.

I guess I could have two different installs of Vanilla pointing to the same database as the one person has. Would this create problems if both installs are writing to the database at the same time? Any other possible issues doing it this way?

Cheers for the help.

422

Only issue i can forsee, is ajax. Vanilla heavily uses ajax. Not sure how that would pan out in iframe on fb... I suppose it should be ok...but above my level of expertise too.

hbf

Homebrew_Korea said:
Cheers for that. The jsswitcher looks like it might work but is unfortunately above my level of ability, programming wise.

I guess I could have two different installs of Vanilla pointing to the same database as the one person has. Would this create problems if both installs are writing to the database at the same time? Any other possible issues doing it this way?

Cheers for the help.

the one problem i have encountered with doing this is related to file uploads. the files get stored in the vanilla/uploads folder so two parallel installs will have two different uploads folders. so something uploaded from one instance will show a broken link in the other.

there are several ways around this, a simple one would be a junction point between the two folders. but you'll need to do some testing there as i've not done it myself.
another easy solution is a batch processes that reconciles the differences between the two folders, but that leads to using up double the disk space and it's not as clean or fool-proof.

someone else had posted another option which used JS to switch between the theming files i believe. i haven't tried it, but it looked like a pretty clean way to allow multiple themes to be running from the same source directory.