Kohana Forums

Niggles:

I miss the 'Who's online' feature.

Suggestions:

Find some relaxing colors, these are a bit too bright...

@BRMatt - edited!

http://vanillaforums.org/addon/559/rounder hows this theme? Green - kohana? :)

http://vanillaforums.org/addon/467/whos-online

Please no tinyMCE. It may be just me but I can't stand that piece of #$#@ or any other WYSIWYG editors in browsers.

HTML/Markdown are king.

@ benjamin

Seems HTML is enabled at the moment. But yeah I want markdown to return.

THE THEME

I wasn't happy with the theme either, so I looked into it. By default this rainbow and unicorns theme is all you get, and.. sadly currently the other available themes are either buggy (always check for "approved" banner), or worse. Not that there are that many of them to begin with.

I'm not really happy with how various components work. What is this "best viewed only on your phone" theme? There's just a lot of cute (and useless) stuff that doesn't make much practical sense.

• Why is there a Back to Discussions button inside this box? (of all places)
  
  
• Why are "Write Comment" and "Preview" not tabs? when they apparently change the view. Why is "Save Draft" styled the same way anyway. Why is it even grouped with them?
  
  
• Why isn't there a breadcrum trail?
  
  
• Why does the thread title designed like a alert box?
  
  
• The 60-characters-per-line is a rule for books, and only books! not webpages. I'm all for fixed layouts but this is just overkill. Way too small.
  
  
• Why is the sidebar on the right side and not on the left side. Everyone scans in a F pattern. It makes sense to always put it on the left side so you don't have to strain your eyes. The only time you put a sidebar on the right side is when it deals with context sensitive actions, possibly disruptive ones, such as Delete, Edit, etc. I don't think the entire navigation of the site should be placed on the 2nd worst place, where people are less likely to see it.
  
  
• The thread titles, are too big. The entire view needs to be more compact.
  
  
• I personally prefer if announcements are just highlighter or prefixed, or both. The way they are now it's pretty annoying, but can't really put my finger on it. Maybe it's the way that tag just seems to be out of place there, I don't know.
  
  
• The yellow in New is super annoying. Reminds me of myspace horror pages of days past. What next scrolling/blinking text? :)
  
  

BUGS

I was trying to reply to the announcement up there. Didn't help that the stupid "you do not have permission" thing showed up as a black bar and the entire interface went boom in Firefox; seems to work (albeit barely) in Chrome.

I'm guessing this was only tested for Safari/Mac (boo!!).

Hey folks, we don't make the forums. Bugs should be reported over at http://github.com/vanillaforums/Garden

That aside, a couple of responses:

1. Vanilla2 ships with Markdown included, but not enabled by default. Installing the Markdown plugin causes errors in discussions where Markdown was used on the old forum. I have to do some research to figure out if multiple input methods are allowed.
2. The Preview thing bit me too, it seems the only way to get out of it is to hit ESC (only when posting a new discussion).
3. There doesn't appear to be a way to hide categories from the main discussions page at this time, so we are just gonna have to live with seeing a little Cyrillic for now. As soon as I find a way, I'll hide that category from the main view.
4. This theme doesn't really impress me either. If anyone can find a theme that is similar to the default Vanilla1 theme and full-width, please post a link.
5. No, there will not be a TinyMCE (or any WYSIWYG). Vanilla probably won't have it, and they are stupid... especially for technical people such as yourselves.

And lastly: yes, we are an early adopter of Vanilla2... it was only officially released about 24 hours ago. The main reason for the quick jump is that Vanilla2 supports SSO (single sign on), which means we should be able to combine your Redmine and Vanilla accounts into a single sign on.

The main reason for the quick jump is that Vanilla2 supports SSO (single sign on), which means we should be able to combine your Redmine and Vanilla accounts into a single sign on.

So, what do we gain from this exactly?

shadowhand a quick look with firebug shows that its easy to make this theme much better:

Change the widths with the ids in style.css to:

#Body
width:99%;

#Content
width:75%;

#Panel
width:23%;

div.CommentForm textarea
width:99%;

Then you have a 100% wide theme that is much better!

Anyone else finding it impossible to sign out?

The main problem I have is a loss of decent functionality for something we don't need. User profile walls for instance, when would we ever use that?

How long is Vanilla 1.x being maintained for? I dread the day I have to move my forum over to this.

@Gazoo, I Improved on your code and fixed the header. Thanks!

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("forum.kohanaframework.org")
{
#Head .Menu, #Body {width:99% !important;}
#Content {width:75% !important;}
#Panel {width:23% !important;}
div.CommentForm textarea {width:99% !important;}
}

@Colonel-Rosa

Sadly "this" is among the decent ones out there. About everything else is just a lousy vbulletin/invision clone. phpBB seems to be making similar moves to what we see in Vanilla at the moment. Oh yey social-networking, the thing forum-goers don't give a damn about, but hey all the cool kids are doing it!

There's a interesting project called bbpress (http://bbpress.org/) , if it sounds familiar it should, since it's made by the same people that made wordpress, the blogging application. Aside from the obvious problems we can probably expect since "its made by the same wordpress folks", hint: wordpress doesn't scale too well (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/04/behold-wordpress-destroyer-of-cpus.html), it actually looks pretty good (by comparison to alternatives anyway).

Frankly, I find a lot of the options available for forum software just seem to be, how should I put it... "out of the loop", or just biased in some way. I mean for got sake even mail clients have a damn Quote button! whos bright idea was not to have one?!

It's no surprise these days a lot of really nice forums out there, are custom ones.

Created a theme full-width CSS posted above. I also added an `img { max-width: 100% !important; }` rule to keep images from breaking the layout. (I'm looking at _you_, Rosa!)

Thanks for the feedback folks!

Edit: Search should be working now, my nginx URL rewriting wasn't properly handling GET params.

The new forum looks great and seems much faster! I like the direction of Vanilla 2. It's great to see some innovation in the forum space.

Vanilla2 supports SSO (single sign on), which means we should be able to combine your Redmine and Vanilla accounts into a single sign on.

@shadowhand: It would be interesting to hear more about this integration after it's complete. Also, any simple tutorials on Vanilla 2 integration with the Kohana Auth module (beyond some of the existing forum posts) would also be interesting.

@Colonel-Rosa: +1 for the left-column navigation

This thread doesn't work for me:
http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/6648/welcome.php (apparently, because of .php in the title)

Ugly horizon scroll bar when viewing post item.

FF 3.6.8

Do we have some kind of cookie failure? I'm always greeted with "Howdy stranger, looks like you're new here" and always have to enter my sign-in details.
I might be strange but I'm not a stranger.

Suggestion:

Might be nice to see if there's some kind of "Profile" plugin to which people could add their url / twitter / location / bio details.

Likes:

Twitter-like Ability to add @ViewUsername (although fails for usernames with spaces and dashes) and #SearchThisTopic to posts.

None of these appear to work: @`Dave Stewart` @"Dave Stewart" "@Dave Stewart" @Dave_Stewart

@Alex007 I'm thinking of actually trying to make some general purpose forum using Kohana in my spare time.

Anyway, to those of you who are getting the scrollbar. Install Stylish (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2108/), then copy/paste the following:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("forum.kohanaframework.org")
{
.Menu { margin:0 10px 10px 10px !important; width:auto !important }
#Body {margin:10px 0 0 0 !important; width:auto !important;}
#Frame {margin:20px !important;}
#Content {width:930px !important;margin-left:270px !important;}
#Panel {width:250px !important; position:absolute !important;}
}
Original written by Colonel-Rosa, but had to tweak it since it doesn't work too well for me. You might wish to edit that width to whatever is your licking as I don't think there's any good relative value.

The "popular tags" box seems very poor. What happend to the old (and very populated) tags cloud? We must re-build it from scratch?

I miss RSS feed

xrado: http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussions/feed.rss

I'd like to see a nice rss feed with just the unread-posts :)
searched a little bit, but couldn't find anything (and never used/implemented Vanilla myself)

Thanks @SpadXIII!

One minor niggle I've noticed is that if I click into a thread and then use my browser (FF3.6.9 or HTC Desire Android) back to return to the discussion list, the list doesn't reload so the "New" flags still show on threads I've just been into. For mobile browsing, a bit fiddly to keep track of where I'm up to. This didn't happen on the previous forum version. If I manually navigate to URI again, the page is properly refreshed.

I can see that there is a historic Expires header sent, but there doesn't seem to be a Cache-control header - was there on the old site?