Giving Vanilla Forums its own Directory

gharald

Is there a way to give Vanilla Forums its own Directory, analogous to what you can do in WordPress?:

"Many people want WordPress to power their site's root (e.g. http://example.com) but they don't want all of the WordPress files cluttering up their root directory. WordPress allows you to install it into a subdirectory, but have your blog exist in the site root."
http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory

[Deleted User]

What Vanilla Version are you using?

Shadowdare

For normal sub-directory installation, you may install Vanilla Forums in its own directory by creating a new directory and uploading the Vanilla Forums files in there. For clean URL support, you must add RewriteBase /YourDirectory/ to Vanilla's .htaccess file.

For something like WordPress' "access a blog which is installed in a sub-directory from the site root" feature, it's not built-in, but you may be able to do so with complex rewrite rules.

gharald

@shadowdare thanks for the input.
@ilovetech Version 2.0.18.10

x00

It should be a lot simpler then wordpress becuase everything goes through a single dispatcher if dynamic.

You have two approaches. If you are not putting anything int he web root that is going to be served, simply change the webroot itself.

Otherwise

Put this in .htaccess for the webroot (keep the .htaccess in the forum folder intact)

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase / 
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
    RewriteRule . - [L]

    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /forumfolder $1 [QSA,L]

</IfModule>

Changing forumfolder to the folder name. Make sure there is no index.php or index.html, etc at all in the web root.

Add these values to your /forumfolder/conf/config.php

$Configuration['Garden']['WebRoot'] = '/forumfolder';
$Configuration['Garden']['StripWebRoot'] = '/forumfolder/';

In /forumfolder/.htaccess make sure RewriteBase is /forumfolder

clear all the *.ini files in /forumfolder/cache

if you want to redirect anything that (such as in post) that is prefixed with this forumfolder you can put

RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_STATUS} ^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1 [QSA,R=301,L]

after the RewriteBase line in /forumfolder/.htaccess that will 301 redirect the external incoming urls to the correct place.

The solution above is much better than the wordpress solution because, the wordpress solution the folder is referenced on output for the resources, and many things like the wp-admin, etc

....

You can put stuff in the web root but use it sparingly. Obviously anything that is web directly or a file, has potential to conflict with any application matching the same url.

Lastly work through the server rules, instead of just applying them, aim to understand every single line. it much better to understand than to blindly copy. A lot is possible with server rules, and server rules are a prerogative of the server admin/web master. There is pleanty of documentation and help online for apache and other server rules.

gharald

@x00 thank you! I will give it a try.

peregrine

@gharald said:
x00 thank you! I will give it a try.

Did it work for you. and what your ultimate solution was after you gave it a try.

so if you come back and see this discussion, it might help other users with the same question