Vanilla Forums Intagration.

Been working on integrating vanilla into dolphin. Just to replace the forums. Everything else still uses orca.

So far the results have been good. Not an easy task tho. So I am thinking of making it a service offering in the market for those that like vanilla as i believe the process is to complex for beginners to simply make it a mod with instructions.

Feel free to check on the integration on my website www.deanbassett.com Link to the forums on the menu.

Hmmm. maybe i should check my spelling first. Cant change a topic title once it's been posted.

Any chance of a non-iframe integration?

It can be taken out of the iframe accessing it directly at deanbassett.com/vanilla

But it's no longer wrapped in a dolphin page. I cannot stuff the forum inside a div. I have tried in the past with IPB, phpBB and Vanilla. Just can't do it. To many problems with links in the forums.

I suppose i could try modifiying the vanilla template to include a dolphin page header. Not sure tho. Vanilla also includes jquery, and things might get messy.

Guess you could at least "mimic" the style and then call Dolphin's menu with PHP.  I did something like that last time I messed around with running Dolphin with other scripts.

 RE:

 Back in the day, before Orca became tolerable for me, I was working on this:

http://www.boonex.com/m/Standalone_Dolphin_Menus

I didn't have too much trouble adding a dolphin menu to ipb.... maybe you can find something useful in that download.

Thanks.

I think i may have another way i am going to try tomarrow(actually today now). If not, i will play with yours.

Whats the consensus on MyBB and using it.

I looked at vanilla, it's about as plain as vanilla ice cream..

What are the benefits of Vanilla over Orca?

Vanilla is kept simple. Like orca

1) In Vanilla you can create private forums and grant whatever members you want access to that forum.

2) Subforums or categories as vanilla calls them. Unlimited number of them.

3) Tagging. I just enabled that plugin.

4) Mark all forum topics read. (Just enabled that plugin.)

And there are many other plugins that can be obtained that will add features to the forums. http://vanillaforums.org/addon/browse/plugins/popular/2/

Some plugins that offer other ways to signup of course can't be used as the forum is using dolphins member base. Signups on the forum have been disabled. So plugins that allow signups through facebook, google, openid, ect cannot be used.

 Same with MyBB, options to assign passwords to topics, and much more...

that is why I dislike our forums and I thought others did too because it is so "plain" and lacking any type of good features.

Thank you for starting this thread... I'd given up the idea of upgrading to a better Forum but now I may add it back onto my "issues" list for my current project.  I've used iframes lots of times and find them very useful in simple situations.  I would not consider this a simple situation but I can understand why you've done it. 

Now I'm curious... once you get all the issues worked out of your installation, how much are you thinking of charging to install it on other sites?  If you're looking for a way to boost your market sales... this could be a one way to do it. ;-)

 I agree, anything to change or have a "choice" to choose from.

I wouldn't think it's cheap, tons of work he has done.

I was just hit up by a new member wanting dolphin but was more concerned with the forums, they have decided not to use the platform just because of that alone..

Maybe Dean will offer a "do it yourself" mod for those of us that are willing to spend hours modifying code in order to get features working as we want them to.

lol, I would rather purchase one..

I believe i am close to a non-iframed version. Still working out the kinks.

As for price.

$100 for the install of vanilla and integrating it into dolphin.

$50 more if you want it skinned to match your site.

NOTE: Some of you. and i know you do epaulo run more than one template on your site. Problem is, vanilla cannot switch templates the same way that dolphin does. So this would have to be a one template deal, or theme as vanilla calls it.

What about this with 7.1? 

 Won't be a problem.

Vanilla was the best choice you could have made for an integration.  I never really paid much attention to it before, but posts are HTML..  not bbcode.... a huge plus.  That makes it a better fit for Dolphin than any other forum script out there

I've noticed that there is a TinyMCE plugin, as well as a HTMLPurifier plugin for Vanilla.  If you could change the Vanilla code to use the existing D7 plugins, it would be a really good thing.  That way, post editing would be the same site-wide.