Circle Theatre & Vanilla

kadams54

We just launched a Vanilla-powered forum for a community theatre company, Circle Theatre.

Several observations:

• Getting the forum tightly integrated into Circle's narrow one-column layout would have been a nightmare with most forum packages. The clean separation of markup and presentation, using DIVs for layout, etc. all made using Vanilla the obvious choice.
• The theming system was not as clean in terms of separating code from UI markup. I'm not a big fan of the echos and PHP code sprinkled throughout. I'd like to see a real templating system (i.e. no more echos) in a Vanilla 2 or 3.
• It seems like Vanilla has a more component-driven approach to the UI, which is interesting given my day job in Java. JSF is going the same route. I have to admit I'm not a big fan of that approach, but maybe it'll grow on me.
• Extensions are excellent, but I have some concerns about performance. Mostly I see page size bloating as more and more CSS and JS files get aggregated on. I'm not sure what could be done about that; maybe there could be some standardization among extension authors on JS libraries (ie. Prototype vs. JQuery vs. Dojo)?
• Kudos to the Vanilla community! Definitely one of the more responsive and helpful open source communities I've participated in.

All in all, it was a very good experience. We had the bulk of the work (integration with the rest of the site) done right away. From there on out it was mostly a matter of tweaking (can we get signatures? can we move this link here? etc.) and "fixing" IE.

Jazzman

Nice example of a good integration of Vanilla!!! nice!!

And welcome to the comminity

ercatli

Yes I agree. This is one of the best uses of Vanilla I have seen.

garvin

*cries* what about my single column forum?! *runs out of the room* : )

kadams54

Thanks Jazzman and ercatli! Garvin, I'm sure your single column forum is excellent :-)

carnold

Nice use of Vanilla! I too have integrated Vanilla into my theme. But, some of my text has become truncated. Like "Bottom of page" on a discussion (i had to change those words to "Scroll Down"). I am assuming you modified the CSS, question is (for me anyway) what did you mod to make these tight fits?

MySchizoBuddy

I agree to point 2 and 4. Echoing html is really bad. A templating engine is required. I doubt mark will agree to use smarty though. perhaps phptemplate the one used by Drupal is very lean and fast. standardizing it on jquery will be best. prototype and scriptaculous are too big.

Vincent

hmm... my new theme that i'm going to release is almost completely html run (not that i'm completely ok with it, but the original theme was in html) and i'm not having any problems with it, it's just the same working as css, you just have to change a couple of the requirements for the css to suit your particular html, that's the only itty gritty stuff.

another thing to be aware or the html theme is that is doesn't run as fast as the css version of vanilla, which is expected, but it still works.

kadams54

I don't care too strongly which templating engine is used (though I'm not sure why all the hate for Smarty). phptemplate or invent your own (aka WordPress' template tags), as long as there is one. While I hate seeing people re-inventing the wheel, if it's well done, learning a new templating engine isn't too bad. Vincent: I'm not really sure what you're getting at, as you seem to be setting HTML and CSS up to opposing technologies (e.g., "the html theme" vs. "the css version"). Could you clarify?

MySchizoBuddy

kadams54 can u post your remarks regarding the template engine on this thread

carnold

@kadams--I am really interested in talking with you about how you got your single column vanilla working. Could you please reply?