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Vanilla Forums launched over at Zoto.net

kordlesskordless
edited January 2007 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
After about a months worth of integration work, the Vanilla based forums are up and running over at http://forum.zoto.net/. These forums are running on the Beta Preview of Zoto 3.0, which will be ready for production in March of 2007. At that time, the forums will be moved from staging to production over at http://forum.zoto.com/ (non-working link there).

I'd like to publicly thank all the developers involved in the production of the Vanilla product. Writing our own forums would have taken many months of effort - something we simply didn't have the time or budget for.

On an integration note, I managed to write a series of stored procedures and views (with dblink) for PostgreSQL that allows the "removal" of the physical LUM_User table. Because the views and stored procedures basically emulate a LUM_User table for Vanilla, very little code had to be changed to support the modified schema. It should be mentioned that this is one of the things that PostgreSQL is really good at.

I will (after our release) attempt to put together a patch for Vanilla that encapsulates the changes I have made to our install in a generic way, such that a user wishing to use Vanilla, PostgreSQL and an external user table should be able to recreate what I have done with minimal effort. As a note, I also have made additional modifications to the "plugin" I released for PostgreSQL a month ago or so, and will be upgrading our install to Vanilla 1.0.3 when time allows.

In the meantime, if anyone has any questions regarding our integration, I would be more than happy to discuss those with you.

Thanks again guys! Vanilla ROCKS!

Comments

  • StashStash ✭
    Looks swish :) But then who *doesn't* like a site with photographic evidence that Sailor Moon really does exist ;)
  • shotoshishotoshi
    I have to say, that is one beautiful looking forum you cooked up there - superb work!
  • WandererWanderer
    I agree, beautiful indeed, however so sloooooooooow, even allowing for the 3 second delay to load scripts. Something else is blocking the pipe surely. pic

    Posted: Friday, 5 January 2007 at 10:37AM (AEDT)

  • StashStash ✭
    I found it quite nipply tbh. Perhaps it's a distance thing?
  • y2kbgy2kbg New
    pretty slow for me! i am in ohio, usa
  • VincentVincent
    ooo, it adds a few things in there that i haven't thought of in my own themes/styles :D

    i like it
  • y2kbgy2kbg New
    Zoto 3.0 is fast. Really fast. Our testing has shown that, when we launch, Zoto 3.0 should be one of the fastest (if not *the* fastest) photo sharing sites on the Internet.

    There's a caveat to this though - while we are development, there is about a 3 second latency on every page load due to the loading of all our JavaScript files. This does not include pagination loads in the lightbox, or on image detail, as those pages don't technically "reload". The reason that the "loading" of these files takes so long is because your browser is trying to see if the JS is up-to-date when it first hits the page. The problem is that it's doing that with about 32 files of JS code. Booo!

    The reason we have so many files is because, well, we are developing. If we put all the code in one big file, we'd never be able to find anything.

    Over the next week to a week and a half we will be pushing out an automated "compiler" that will allow us to run those 32 separate files for us, but use 1 big file for the rest of you.

    The net effect is about a 3-4 second speedup per page reload on the site. We tested this last week and it really is impressive!



    is this from vanilla. is vanilla all seprate by default if so how could i combine all of these to increase speed?
  • StashStash ✭
    Ideally it would be great if someone would create a CSS/JS file aggregator/compressor for Vanilla. This would benefit the whole community as we add more and more extensions.
  • DinoboffDinoboff
    Something like that would be good: http://www.ejeliot.com/blog/72
  • StashStash ✭
    Exactly Dinoboff! When will you write the extension? :D
  • DinoboffDinoboff
    It was already on the list but I don't have time right now.
  • kordlesskordless
    @y2kbg Yeah, we are including a bunch of our own JS in the Vanilla install, so that's slowing things down for the moment. Install and fire up TamperData and you'll see what I mean about the overhead in checking the up-to-dateness of the JS on the site. We'll address this with the compiled single file version in a week or so. The default install of Vanilla doesn't include a ton of files - this page has 8 or so on it for JS and another 7 or so for CSS. Compiling a vanilla_all.js would speed things up by about 1/2 second or so based on our tests.
  • jawelejawele
    @Stash & Dinoboff yes indeed that will be really useful.... good idea guys ;)
  • StashStash ✭
    kordless, while it might only be 1/2 a second or so for a decent connection, I'm betting that slower/higher latency connections would benefit more from sending only 1 request for a single JS and 1 for a single CSS file instead of 15+, and as you add more extensions to a forum this would only get better for the single files.

    I don't suppose you would be able to sort out that extension once you've figured it out for yourselves would you? Only I don't have the capability to do anything this complex yet (and maybe never...).
  • y2kbgy2kbg New
    do multiple php files slow it down as well?
  • StashStash ✭
    Not in the same way. PHP are all done on the server end, there is no more communication between the server and the client as you add more and more PHP files, so latency of connection makes no difference there. It's this that slows down slower connections even more when you're requestion 20-30 files per page load instead of 2-3.
  • JoeJoe
    The forum looks great mate. The main site doesn't work for me though. I'm running Firefox in Ubuntu Linux. Sorry if someone's already mentioned it. Joe
This discussion has been closed.