Vanilla 2.8 is now available

Linc · February 2019

This is a very big release! See the full release notes or our pre-announcement.

Highlights

Keystone Theme is now available and will be the default for new installs. It is fully responsive and brings a fresh new look to Vanilla.
Rich Text Editor is now available and will be the default for new installs. It brings a best-of-class writing experience to Vanilla.
The addons Akismet, Pockets, and Hero Image are now in core. These tremendously popular addons are now available without extra work.
The addons Button Bar and OpenID are deprecated. They have been moved out of core.
The addon Debugger has been deleted. (The DebugBar addon replaces it and is newly open sourced, but is not in core.)
Many medium-severity security issues reported via our HackerOne campaign are now resolved.

Instructions to install, upgrade, and troubleshoot Vanilla are linked in the README file included in the download.

For help troubleshooting, start a new discussion and include what steps you have already taken from our troubleshooting list.

This is the FINAL release that will support PHP 7.0. It is our policy to drop support for PHP versions that have ended security support (PHP 7.0 support ended in December), and thus our next version will require PHP 7.1. (Note that the current PHP version is now 7.3 and we strongly recommend upgrading to it.)

Support for Vanilla 2.6.x has now ended.

PCTipsGR · February 2019

Perfect, now I can finally use Rich Editor and the other awesome plugins you have shipped (I did not mention keystone because I was already using it on previous version and it worked).

Thank you Vanilla! I'm glad that I chose Vanilla for my forums.

By the way, Softaculous has not made it available yet, and given the fact that users that tried manual update ruined their forums, I would like to call all Softaculous users to "report new version" so that it gets updated there too.

pioc34 · February 2019

I have updated my forum. I will now build a new theme based on keystone. Thank you for all!!!

Linc · February 2019

Softaculous has not made it available yet

My experience lately has been that they are usually quite quick to notice new versions and make them available, so I'd expect to see it there early next week.

aziz · February 2019

The first time I installed Vanilla CMS 2.8, I see this after installation!

Help what to do?

whu606 · February 2019

This may be the same as the problem I have experienced installing Vanilla in XAMPPP since 2.6.

If it is, going to the dashboard and enabling any plugin will enable the Vanilla plugin. However, you may find you are unable to enable to applications, such as Messenger for PMs.

Linc · February 2019

Yes, the workaround for Apache on Windows is to enable an addon. We haven't tracked down the root cause yet.

Linc · February 2019

For developers, we're documenting our PHP version support process.

FBI · February 2019

Well, before upgrading my huge forum, I will update my own server to PHP 7.3.

Thanks for the information. Glad to see this.

I think, I will upgrade and use Vanilla as default forum for some of my clients instead of Flarum. Good job and thaks for the hard work ^_^

Regards,

ex- My MyBB user 😀

FBI · February 2019

vanilla.jpg

Update it, easily... 2Gigs Databases upgrade it within minutes..

This is what I am doing:

disable whole plugins, then rename (or remove) the folder for later use
change to default theme, then rename (or remove) the folder for later use
activated maintenance mode
uploading and overwriting all files
then do database upgrading process (forum.com/utility/update), just wait till the browser show the finished sign (ignore displayed successful message from browser, actually the upgrade process working, depend how big your forum and server. Just wait.....). It takes less than 2 minutes for my forum.
voilaa.... everything works.... and I see Pocket Plugin memorize my whole custom code..
and Keystone theme is amazing and fully mobile friendly!!

mmckinn · February 2019

https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/255564#Comment_255564

@FBI Pardon my n00bishness, as I'm am fairly green to this, but not totally. I know enough to be dangerous. lol

I have a dev side of my vanilla forum setup so I'm not mucking around with my production forum in case I break something. I followed your steps to the T and ended up wiping out all my branding info. It appears to have kept my logo, though, even though that field is also blank in the dashboard.🤔

Since I still have 2.6.4 installed as my production site, with essentially the same info that was previously on my dev site, where should I be looking to find all that info so I can copy it back to my dev site?

Linc · February 2019

Today, we uploaded a new copy of the 2.8 zip file to the addons directory. We had accidentally included some front-end build files from an internal project that bloated the size of the package without providing any additional functionality. It has been removed.

You can manually remove the files by deleting the folder /dist/knowledgebase from your copy. It's not hurting anything if you leave it there.

Thanks to @R_J for reporting it.

pinchies · February 2019

2.8 has broken file uploads again.... on my forum, and it looks like on others too:

here and here

I get an error message:

"You are not allowed to upload files in this category"

Linc · March 2019

https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/255823#Comment_255823

It's possible what you're seeing is a security patch enforcing permissions as they were set in the Dashboard correctly for the first time. I haven't seen anyone provide more debugging information (in a separate discussion, as requested), and from what I can tell your cited examples were able to sort it out themselves, implying it was indeed a configuration issue.