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!
Embedding YouTube Video
You can easily embed a YouTube video using a simple span class:
<span class="youtube-embed">M8BxbdQqMRE</span>
Enter the above code in any new discussion or discussion comment.
*NOTE: The video id is located in the YouTube URL after the = .
That’s it!
Tag Name
link
Description
The literal tag is used to enclose content that you don’t want to be parsed by the custom theme. Use this tag when you have content with curly-braces, but they aren’t tags.
Example
body {
font-family: Verdana;
}
See full list of Template Tags
Tag Name
searchbox
Description
The searchbox tag is used to display the default search function.
Values
There are no values for this tag.
Example
<div id="Search">{searchbox}</div>
This will display the search function inside of a div called Search.
See full list of Template Tags
Tag Name
logo
Description
The logo tag is used to display the custom logo uploaded under banner in the dashboard.
Values
There are no values for this tag.
Example
<h1>{logo}</h1>
This will display your custom logo inside an H1 tag.
See full list of Template Tags
