Blogworld LA Keynote: Peter Shankman
Live-Blogging Blogworld LA 2011: Why Peter still believes in Klout, but has some issues with its current state, having been a big fan from the beginning.
Winner of the iPad 2 Vanilla BlogWorld draw!
Congratulations to @doctorklein , enjoy your new iPad 2!
Here’s what the Dr. had to say “The Vanilla layout is clean and beautiful, I can customize just about everything, and it integrated flawlessly to my wordpress page. Can’t wait to start our vanilla forum discussions on my new ipad2!”
We would like to thank everyone who signed up for Vanilla during BlogWorld and New Media Expo NY 2011 and entering the draw for an iPad 2!
If you missed us in NY come find us at BlogWorld and New Media Expo LA 2011 Nov-3-5.
Welcome Aboard Greg!
Vanilla is a growing team and in March Greg Marlin joined as our new Vice-President of Sales and Marketing. We are very excited to have him aboard!
More about Greg
Greg has diverse experience working for companies ranging from software start-ups to a large multinational in the form of Siemens AG. He has worked at a senior level in North America, Europe and Africa and is fluent in English, German, French and can manage a conversation in Swahili. He holds a Bachelor of International Business from Carleton University with an exchange year in Management of Engineering from the Technical University of Berlin.
At Vanilla Greg leads all sales, marketing and strategic partnerships efforts. He is focused on building a highly responsive and accountable sales and marketing organization that can best identify and serve customer and partner needs quickly and efficiently. Always looking for ways to improve, he appreciates the feedback of committed partners to help Vanilla do this.
Welcome Aboard Lizzie!
Vanilla is a growing team and recently we just hired Lizzie McGlinchey as our new project manager. We are very excited to have her aboard!
More about Lizzie
Lizzie McGlinchey is a Web Project Manager. She has managed the production of large-scale, fashion e-commerce projects in addition to the development of social media games, contests, and applications. Lizzie is a believer in the Scrum methodology and Agile Project Management.
Lizzie is also a classical musician, having performed with orchestras internationally as well as here in Montreal with the Orchestra Symphonique de Montreal. She studied at McGill and Carnegie Mellon University.
Early stage moderation tips – Knowledge center
This is the third article in a series of articles called the “Knowledge Center“. These articles are aimed at helping you understand what steps are necessary to get your community off the ground and help it grow and flourish.
Here’s a sneak peak of future articles:
- What to do first when setting up a forum
- Integration tips and tricks
- Early stage moderation tips
- Fundamentals of building and scaling a community
- Marketing and monetizing your forum
Make sure to keep checking the blog for updates.
Integration tips and tricks – Knowledge Center
This is the second article in a series of articles called the “Knowledge Center“. These articles are aimed at helping you understand what steps are necessary to get your community off the ground and help it grow and flourish.
Here’s a sneak peak of future articles:
- What to do first when setting up a forum
- Integration tips and tricks
- Early-stage moderation tips
- Fundamentals of building and scaling a community
- Marketing and monetizing your forum
Make sure to keep checking the blog for updates.
Knowledge Center
Getting started and setting up Vanilla is easy, but building and managing a successful community can take time. We understand how to create a successful community, it’s what we do, and we want to help you build a successful community as well. Reflecting on our success as community builders over the past years we have put together a series of articles called the “Knowledge Center“. These articles are aimed at helping you understand what steps are necessary to get your community off the ground and help it grow and flourish.
The first available article is appropriately entitled “What to do first when setting up a forum!“. We will be releasing a handful of articles over the next few weeks.
Here’s a sneak peak of future articles:
- Integration tips and tricks
- Early-stage moderation tips
- Fundamentals of building and scaling a community
- Marketing and monetizing your forum
Make sure to keep checking the blog for updates.
Vanilla is Hiring!
Vanilla Forums is growing its team.
Vanilla Forums was first released in 2005, and has been used to power discussions on over 400,000 sites around the world. Vanilla brings a fresh and innovative perspective to the crowded discussion forum market by offering true customization and seamless integration with existing solutions. We are fiercely dedicated to providing innovative service offers.
Available Positions:
Full details on all positions here: http://vanillaforums.com/info/hiring
Show your love for Vanilla and help us find that special someone and retweet the following:
@vanilla is hiring sales, mgmt, design & dev positions. Great jobs at a fast-growing company: http://vanillaforums.com/info/hiring PLZ RT
Vote Vanilla For Best Forum Software
Every year forum-software.org run a contest for the Best Forum Software. This year we have been added to the list of contestants! We need all the support we can get to show the world that “The forum is dead, long live Vanilla“.
All you need to do is go to this page, click the box next to Vanilla Forums, and click vote! After you vote there, if you wouldn’t mind taking the time to rate us 5 stars we’d appreciate it as well!
Thanks!
- Team Vanilla
You can also show your support by adding our voting badge to your signature, forum, or website.
Paste this code: <a href=”http://www.forum-software.org/vote-for-best-forum-software-of-2011″><img src=”http://vanillaforums.com/blog/vote_vanilla_badge.png”></a>
Vanilla WordPress Plugins and Widgets
Over the past few months we have seen more and more WordPress developers and designers integrate with Vanilla Forums. Since we love WordPress so much and use it for our own blog, we’ve decided to release a suite of plugins and widgets to help make it easier for you to integrate with Vanilla on your WordPress site/blog.
Plugins/Widgets
- <embed> Vanilla – We have updated this plugin to give you more control over embedding and theming.
- Vanilla Discussions Widget allows you to display recent discussions in your Vanilla Forum in your WordPress site. You define how many discussions to show, and you can even filter to specific discussion categories.
- Vanilla Activity Widget allows you to display recent activity in your forum (user registrations, status updates, etc). You define how many activities to show, and you can even filter to activities from users in specific roles (administrator activity, for example).
- Vanilla Recently Active Users Widget allows you to display a list of users who have been recently active on your forum. You define how many users to show.
Get the Vanilla WordPress Plugins and Widgets 0n WordPress.org
I will be posting a tutorial soon on “How to integrate Vanilla WordPress plugins and widgets” and putting together some videos on screenr, keep watching the blog.
