Blog Documentation Try Vanilla Cloud
Please upgrade here. These earlier versions are no longer being updated and have security issues.
HackerOne users: Testing against this community violates our program's Terms of Service and will result in your bounty being denied.
Options

newbie searching for an easy forum download

nitehawknitehawk New
in Vanilla 2.0 - 2.8

Hello!
I admit I am a newbie in web building..
I managed so far to put together most of a wordpress website ( still offline) and wanted to add a small forum page to the site. I started with a well known forum plugin for wordpress, and no matter how many youtube videos I watched and followed directions very closely , I couldn't get the login--password-register to work properly. I went to their website for help and ended up getting spam in my email box For my efforts --an advertisement for pills of some sort and no help from the forum community :-(
I reinstalled the plugin several times, still no go, so I scrapped it and tried a different forum software.
Afterwards I found out that the new software- unless I am a techie -it wasn't compatible with wordpress,--- waaay beyond my level of expertise. So I scrapped that one too. There was a plugin for vanilla, on the plugin site-- so I downloaded that one, and I was checking it over and it was I think 1.1.7or something like that, and had not been updated for I think it was 4 years..
I came to this website an it seems there are newer open sourced versions available...
So I am wondering if I can manage to install a newer version, and if it is reasonably easy for a "newbie"
to install and set up..
thanks for the advise..

Comments

  • Options
    data66data66 ✭

    Hey there! I don't post here often but saw this and figured to add a little input. I'm sure the gurus will post more advice.

    If you want a great forum, you want to consider quality over ease in every case. Most hosts offer script install (many that I've dealt with including Cazaratech where I host my sites).

    Vanilla is a great forum and I tried a few before coming to this one for my forum, including the bigger named expensive one that many use. I find the team here to be responsive and the gurus quite helpful. The forum setup is pretty straight forward and documentation is well done.

    Advice is to test it on a local install. That may sound scary if you've never done it but we all start as noobs and have to learn. :) If you learn doing local, it'll help you avoid issues on a live site while you get a good handle on how things work and how you want the live site set up. I use Mamp Pro (available for any operating system). It is a very easy thing to set up and you may find it much easier to learn various website scripts as well as test plugins before putting them on a live site.

    As for plugins for Wordpress, I don't use it as a plugin so I'm not all that helpful. If you don't need it integrated into wordpress, you could add it as a menu on your wordpress site if that's your main focus. If not, I would have the forum as the main part and put a wordpress menu link in your Vanilla forum instead. That's how I have my ScriptTechs kb set up.

  • Options
    nitehawknitehawk New

    Question--- is the 1.1.7 plugin rather old and maybe obsolete over the new 2.5??
    Must the 2.5 vanilla forum be manually installed?
    thanks

  • Options
    nitehawknitehawk New

    Another question--
    In manually downloading vanilla forums what is the difference in the procedure of embedding and integrating? what is the difference?
    Thanks

Sign In or Register to comment.