If you are embedding a forum into your Facebook page, it makes sense to offer Facebook authentication. The steps to getting set-up with this are fairly straightforward but warrant explanation.
- From your admin dashboard, click on the Authentication tab. Now select Facebook from the ‘Configure an Authenticator’ drop-down menu.
- Open up a new browser window and type in the following address to visit: https://developers.facebook.com/apps . This will prompt you to login to Facebook. Do so with your regular personal Facebook account or a new Facebook account you created for this purpose.
- Next click on ‘Create New App’ and input an App Name. A good name here would be your Company Name and the word Forum (e.g. Acme Forum). You can leave the App Namespace blank. Hit save and then you will be prompted to fill in a Captcha box before proceeding.
- You should now see a summary app screen that already shows your App ID and App Secret. There is one more thing you need to do from Facebook before going back to configure the Vanilla side of things. Where it says ‘select how your app integrates with Facebook’ click on ‘Website’. Type in your site URL, which is your Vanilla Forums URL (e.g. companyname.vanillaforums.com) or if you already have set-up a custom domain you can use that (e.g. forum.companyname.com) and hit ‘Save Changes’.
- Now that you have your App ID and App Secret, you can go back and enter them on your Vanilla Dashboard in the areas provided beneath your Facebook Authenticator screen. So copy and paste the App ID into the ‘Application ID’ and copy and paste the App Secret into the ‘Application Secret’ boxes. Now you can hit save. You will see the system work briefly and then it will be saved. Also click on ‘Activate’ so that the Facebook Authenticator is activated. Now your Facebook Authenticator is configured and working.
- If you select the Facebook Authenticator again from the drop-down menu there are a couple of other options you can choose to configure (you can also set these up while you are entering your App ID and App Secret).
- Check the ‘Use Facebook names for usernames’ box if you want your users to be automatically given a username on the forum that is identical to their Facebook name. Uncheck this box if you want them to set-up a new forum username when they sign-up. Check the ‘Send users a welcome e-mail’ if you want to send people signing up through Facebook a system e-mail welcoming them to the forum or uncheck this box if you don’t. When you have finished checking or unchecking the boxes, click on ‘Save’.
- That’s it. Your Facebook Authenticator is ready to go. Registrants will now see the ‘Login with Facebook’ button when they are signing up.
If you are looking to add a little pizzazz to your Facebook fan page while tying it back to a site you control, you’ll be interested in how to embed a Vanilla Forum into a page. You can see this live at the Vanilla Forums FB Page Forum. Feel free to sign-up for a member account on that forum and play around.
As cool as this is, it’s actually quite simple to achieve:
- You must have a FB page obviously.
- You must have a Vanilla Forum.
- On your FB page you want to enable the Static HTML application.
- Next you want make sure that your Vanilla Forum has the Embed Vanilla theme enabled and you want to remove the right sidebar. You can do both of these things from the Embed Vanilla tab (shocking, I know).
- Now grab the Embed Vanilla javascript and paste that code into the page contents area in the Static HTML tab interface. You probably want to name the new tab “Forum” or something like that too.
Save changes and you are done! Since you will be logged in as a page administrator, you will see a message asking you to either “view tab as a fan”, “view tab as a non-fan”, or “go back to editor”. Click on one of the “view tab” options to see your embedded Facebook page forum in action. If you log out of your Facebook account and go back to your Facebook page, you will now see the forum every time you click on the tab, without getting the admin message. This is what your regular Facebook fans see.
The forum will be working simultaneously on the Facebook tab as well as on your normal forum site. You can moderate and control content and users from either/or both sites and you have one admin dashboard that controls both. You can see an example of this by visiting the regular site of our Facebook demo forum at fb.vanillaforums.com and compare that to our Facebook page forum.
Feel free to comment on this post if you hit any snags getting set-up.
One of the features of the Vanilla WordPress Forum Plugin is the widgets. These widgets allow you to display an updating feed of activity and discussions on your blog. While this post deals with an explanation of how those work and how you would use them, you can also view a ScreenR video that walks you through how to set-up the Discussion, Activity and User widgets of the Vanilla WordPress Forum Plugin. If you want us do it for you, perhaps as part of a more complicated theme design or commercial installation, you can contact us about the Vanilla Forums Managed Install and Professional Services.
The Discussion Widget allows you to display an updating list of recent discussions from the forum. If you look in the right column of this post, you will notice that we have one displayed third from the bottom. This gives your blog audience rapid access to the latest discussion activity in the forum and a reason to get involved, increasing the likelihood that they will stay on your site and extend the value of your content. You can filter what discussions to display by category and you can also chose how many to display.
The Activity Widget allows you to display recent activity from across your forum. Examples of this would be members joining the forum or members updating their profile. By showing that there is activity going on in the forum, it encourages the viewer to get involved themselves. This helps to build a community around your content, again extending its value and encouraging members to create content themselves for the community. Here you can filter what types of activities to display and how many. If you look in the right column, you can see we have one displayed on this blog second from the bottom.
The User Widget allows you to display avatars of the most recently active members. This another way for the user to recognize that there is activity in the forum and desire to get involved. Here you can chose how many avatars to display at a time and the width of the avatar icons.
For all of the widgets you can chose the title for that widget to be displayed on your blog, so you can name them what you want in order to suit the unique voice of your community.
Vanilla Forums has a plugin for WordPress to help you integrate your WordPress blog with a forum. Why would you do this? Because your readers need to have something to do after reading your great content and comments just aren’t enough. Comments are linear, whereas when you talk to your friends about a great movie, the conversation likes to go on tangents. A forum allows you to create new discussion threads around those topics and keep the conversation going on a number of fronts, long after the original content piece has been buried off of your home page.
So what does the WordPress Forum Plugin do? Well, for one thing, it allows you to integrate your member database between your forum and blog, using single-sign-on. Why is this important? Because you want the both the forum and blog to be indistinguishable in terms of being part of your site. The audience should never feel like they are leaving one site to go to another. This is a major flaw in a lot of forum implementations – you leave a nice site to go to a forum that looks hideous and nothing like the site you just left (how appealing!).
Which brings up themes: with Vanilla Forums rich theme customization possibilities you can style the forum to look just like your blog. Not a CSS/HTML whiz? No problem, if you are a customer of our hosted platform, we offer a managed installation service that will skin your forum to match your blog. Alternatively, you can use our Embed Vanilla feature and embed the forum right into your page.
Whether the goal of your site is monetization, public awareness, education, or pretty much any other goal, a good result is getting your audience to participate more, hang around your site longer, and in general build a community around your blog.
Our latest release, as of this post date, comes with many new features including a suite of WordPress plugins and widgets to help you better integrate Vanilla Forums with WordPress. In this tutorial I will walk you through the basics steps required to install, enable, and integrate these plugins.
What we will cover
Vanilla Social Connect enables your users to sign into your community with Facebook, Twitter, Google, and OpenID. In this tutorial we will cover how to set up each plugin for your forum.
What we will cover
Continued…
If you’re looking for a simple way to translate your Vanilla forum you can easily add Google Translate with Custom Theme.
*The Custom Theme feature is available to Plus and Premium Plan members only!
What is Google Translate?
Google Translate is a free statistically-based machine translation service provided by Google Inc. to translate a section of text, document or webpage, into another language.
Currently Google Translate offers the following languages when adding their service to your site(vanilla forum): English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (Simplified).
Understanding the Google code
All you need to do is pass Google your forum url and specify what language to translate the content into.
http://google.com/translate?langpair=XX%7CYY&u=(your URL here)
A closer look at the code above: XX is the code for the original language and YY is the code for the language which you want to translate into.
So for example, if you wanted to translate your forum into French you would change the XX to en and the YY to fr.
<a href="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cfr&u=http://yourforumname.vanillaforums.com">
French
</a>
Adding Google Translate to your Vanilla forum
Let’s begin!
*You may want to also read the tutorial on using Custom Theme
- Go to Custom Theme – located on the left Menu Panel under Appearance.
- Once inside of Custom Theme the ‘Edit Html’ tab will be active by default – this is where we will add the Google Translate code.
We will start by adding a link in the main menu to translate Vanilla into French. In ‘Edit Html’ look for <ul id “Menu”>. After the last link, {signinout_link}, add the following code:
<a href="http://google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Cfr&u=http://yourforumname.vanillaforums.com">
French
</a>
Here is the result:
Now click on the ‘French” link and watch the magic happen!
Before
After
Now get translating! ☺
This topic deals with importing your old forum into Vanilla 2 using the Vanilla 2 export tool. The process is basically three steps:
- Export your old forum data with the Vanilla 2 export tool.
- Create a new Vanilla 2 installation.
- Import the file from step 1 to Vanilla 2
Export Your Old Forum Data
We’ve made a tool that you can use to put your old forum into a format that Vanilla 2 can import. We currently support exports from:
- Vanilla 1
- phpBB
- vBulletin
- bbPress
- SimplePress
Here is how you use it:
- Grab the Vanilla 2 exporter here. The download is one file that you will copy to your server and run.
- Unzip the file to a directory in your old forum. For example, if your forum is located in /www/mysite/myforum then you would unzip the file to /www/mysite/myforum/vanilla2export.php.By default, the exporter will prompt you to save your export file. If your forum has a lot of data, it might make more sense to have the exporter save your data to a file on your server. If this is the case, you will need to place the vanilla2export.php file in a directory that is writable. Most forums have a /filesor /uploads directory for this.
- Browse to vanilla2export.php in your web browser. You should see a page like this:
- You will need to know some information about your database in order to do the export. If you can’t remember, try looking at your forum’s configuration file. Once you’ve entered the information click Begin Export.
- A single file should be generated. This is the file that will be imported into Vanilla 2.
Create a New Vanilla 2 Installation
In order to import your data, you will need a fresh installation of Vanilla 2. When you do the import, all data in your fresh installation will be overwritten, so make sure you don’t have any discussions you want to keep there.
Import Your Forum
Vanilla 2 has an import utility in its dashboard. This is what you’ll use to import your forum.
- Go to the import tool located in your dashboard under Site Settings > Import.
- There are only a few inputs required. You need to upload the file and supply the username and password of the old forum’s administrative user. If your file is large (say over 5MB), you might want to upload the file manually to your /uploads directory using ftp.
- When you are ready to go click Upload File to get started.
- Once the file has been uploaded you’ll see a short summary. Click Start Import to start the import.
- The import should run on its own now. The length of time it takes depends on how much data you have to import. However, you will see a status update as the import progresses.
- Once the import is complete your data is now ready to go, however you might want to go through your site’s settings to update some of the stuff that wasn’t imported. One of the places you’ll definitely want to check is Roles & Permissions or else no one will have permission to view the discussions you just imported.
- At this point you’re done. Congratulations! Your Vanilla 2 installation is ready to go with your old forum’s data.
Notes
- As of version 1.3.0 the porter will export the file attachments database data so you can port your attachments over to Vanilla 2. To do this you must enable the File Upload Vanilla 2 plugin before importing your data. You them must copy the contents of Vanilla 1′s /uploads folder to Vanilla 2′s /uploads folder.
Some Vanilla themes can be customized with additional options if they have a Theme Options page. Theme Options can include: color styles, text areas, and images.
*This feature is available to all members.
What we will cover
Lets begin!
Locating Theme Options
There are 2 ways to locate the Theme Options within the dashboard.
- On the left Menu Panel under Appearance click on (Theme Name) Options. Or,
- Inside of Themes you will notice a ‘Theme Options’ link next to your Current Theme screenshot
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Inside of Theme Options
The Theme Options Page
Once inside of Theme Options you will be able to customize whatever options *this theme has. For example, the new Vanilla Default theme now has 7 color styles to choose from.
Other themes like rounder have customizable text areas
Enjoy your new options and keep checking the blog for new customizable themes to come!
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You know how you can @mention your friends in twitter? You can do that in Vanilla too.
Just put an @ in front of the person (or people’s) name:
And then their names will be linked to their profile on the resulting comment:
And the user will also receive a notification in their profile that they were mentioned:
If the user has chosen it in their preferences, they will also receive an email notification that they were mentioned. It is a great way to bring people back to your community!
