What Addon/Plugin would you like to have so bad?
Hey there,
A few years back, I guess in 2018 I'd installed Vanilla to start a new niche platform after I sold my long time Vbulletin forum.
Unfortunately, I had to take it down in less than a month, because it was supposed to be for vloggers, and the friends I thought would participate in the project got busy with other stuffs.
Anyway, the long story short, I've re-brought it from the dead and upgraded it to the latest release, and started customizing its Theme, and it's in Arabic, and if you wanna have a look, make sure you're using the Desktop view on your mobile, or just check it out using a Laptop/Desktop: gafdal.com
Also, make sure to refresh the page if you opened it in a mobile device after you set the Desktop view to see the customizations. Oh, it's in RTL too since Arabic is written from Right to Left just like Persian, Hebrew, Farsi...etc
As a web developer, I want to contribute to the community, while it'll help me build a good platform out of it as well, so I'd like to know what are the most sought after features/addons/plugins you'd like to have on Vanilla?
I still have a VB license, but for the love of God I couldn't get myself to use an archaic piece of software that has decided to be anti-customization and non-developer-friendly regardless of how stable and mature it is.
I was tempted to get XenForo, but in all honesty Vanilla just stunned me by its speed and how lightweight it is in browsers, and the mere fact of being OpenSource sums it all up.
So, here is the deal, I will provide the Addon free of charge, all I need to know is the consensus of what should be prioritized, especially if you have a well established community, and you really came to the need of a certain feature to serve your clients best.
Let's see if anyone would be interested in this offer.
I'll give it the whole Month of Jan 2022 to decide by the end of it what should I work on.
Thanks for your time if you're still reading up to here :)
Comments
Everybody's happy. I'm a little bit surprised... 🤔
Nice write-up. I think that a proper „Groups“ addon will be something Vanilla OS needs and was often requested in the last years.
I have just signed up, but it occurs to me the ability to have a blast through Signal or Telegram might be very useful.
I wish I knew PHP to make it too! (I will learn soon to create some of my contributions here)
What I wanted to have:
I have lots more that could be great to be added.
I have a couple of pretty specific ideas, but I'm not sure how appealing they would be to an average forum. Here they are anyway 😁
Attachment manager for users:
Big believer in users being in control of their own data, so I've added addons that lets users delete their own accounts and download their data, but haven't found an attachment manager that lets users sort out their attachments. I have the Media Manager from Vanillaskins and it's nice for keeping an eye on things, but something that lets users handle it themselves would be pretty neat.
An elegant way to automatically promote members:
We've set it up so that all new members start with very limited permissions to weed out the spam bots filling their profiles with dodgy links. Some kind of automation which promotes people to regular members after certain number of configurable triggers like time registered, posts made or others would be nice. Currently have something implemented in Yaga, but it's not very elegant, nor completely reliable.
Discord integration (or maybe just webhooks in general):
We have a pretty lively Discord community to go along with the forums so would be nice if it was easy to post interesting forum stuff on Discord as well. Vice versa would be neat too, but getting stuff out of Discord is probably a lot harder than getting it in there. There is an addon, but it doesn't work quite as advertised and hasn't had any updates since it was first posted. Would be neat, if you could automate things with IFTTT or Zapier too.
Featured posts:
We're an art forum, so would be nice to have an easy way to click a button on a comment (or discussion) with some excellent artwork and have it appear on the front page with an image and links to the post and whoever made it. Could also keep an archive of featured posts on a separate page. I have prototyped something Yaga based (A feature reaction limited to moderation staff and then scraping the relevant /best/actions/ page) but a dedicated addon could be kinda useful.
An easy way to add new custom embeds (and bbcode):
We're still running bbcode (forum goes back to something like 2001 and used to run vbulletin), so would be nice to to have an easy way to add more tags. On a more generic note, some kind of embed editor with an UI and everything, which lets you hook up an embed code for something like Gfycat, or Sketchfab and just posts it on the forums similar to Youtube or Twitter embeds.
Different styles for different categories:
Kinda art forum specific thing again. Would be nice to be able to set some categories as galleries (for example) and have them show up as Masonry or some other gallery looking layout. There are addons for that, but I think they're all for the entire forum and don't let you set it up for specific category.
A blog plugin, succesor for Nillablog (https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/nillablog-plugin)
Different styles for different categories!
I love this idea!
But you already have that. The category name is part of the body class. Just inspect this page and you will find body.Section-Category-developers
I had maybe something a little more elaborate in mind, like this category uses modern layout, this one uses table and this one is a fancy gallery type deal, but I didn't actually know that it was a class you could access, so thanks for letting me know. 😄
Since there is no fancy gallery layout, that sounds more like a theme 😉
Based on what you think of, CSS might not be enough and you have to populate some more data in the discussions overview in order to get your gallery.
Using different layouts for categories shouldn't be hard to implement. But I as a forum user can't think of a forum where I would see a benefit for a mixture of those both layouts. As an admin I would avoid it in order to avoid people asking for just the other layout in the category where they think it would be better suited... Wait... That said, giving users the possibility to choose their layout would make more sense. But that would put the admin in a situation where he needs to ensure that every customization looks good on both layouts...
Yeah, category specific theme probably would've been a more clever implementation to suggest now that I think of it. 🤔
It's actually partially your fault though. I was messing with that Masonry addon on your Github some time ago and thought it might make a cool gallery, but I don't want the whole forum to work that way. Also, I use table layout, and it only works on modern, if I'm remembering right. Anyway, I dropped it, but clearly some kind of an idea stuck.
I'd love to see a working Pool mechanism :)
Not Upvote/Downvote only, but w configurable answers with some sliders/dropdown selectors and field for opentext :)