Adding Some Vanilla to Ja Kel Daily

UPDATE: New Vanilla Forum Is Live, Signup and post your discussion!  Just click sign in upper right in the header and then click Apply for membership. Once you’re approved you can start posting your discussions.

As part of the site redesign and integration we wanted the forum to have the same look and feel as the rest of the site and I have been working on a solution to this for the past week (yes, neglecting my daily blog posts). The current forum is using SMF, after much research and analyzing the coding I feel it would be far more work than I am interested in.

Finally, just yesterday I stumbled onto to forum software solution called Vanilla and really liked the functionality/look. Installation was fairly straight forward just download and then upload the files via FTP.  

Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free! In Vanilla you can quickly and easily see which discussions you haven’t read, and how many new comments are in each discussion. You can run advanced searches through discussion topics, comments, and users.

The part that was a little more complicated was setting up the MySQL database in my GoDaddy hosting.  When you have successfully set up the database go to your browser and type the full path to the Vanilla folder and follow the install instructions.

GoDaddy Hosting MySQL Steps:

  • Log into account
  • My account
  • Hosting Account List
  • Open Control Panel
  • Databases
  • MySQL
  • Create Database
  • Description: (Vanilla) UserName: (You Choose) Password: (You Choose) Confirm Password
  • Once Setup is complete
  • Click the edit pencil
  • Copy the host name you will need it for the first entry when following the install steps for installation of Vanilla.
  • MySQL installed – complete.

Vanilla also has a selection of themes available for download and I choose blogger 1.3 (just download then upload to the Vanilla themes folder). I feel that with a lot of stress/time editing the css/php code I can eventually achieve the look and feel aspect of Ja Kel Daily. After completion I will be emailing all users of the old forum to invite them to sign up and start using the new site. However I will not be deleting the old site but will not be linking to it from the main site.  

Note: hired a graphics designer for the new logo, first sketches coming this weekend.   

September 10, 2007 | posted in Talk, The Net 

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8 Responses to “Adding Some Vanilla to Ja Kel Daily”

  1. Mapper Blog on September 10th, 2007

    Thank you for the post. Can you please let me know more on detail of this? (as stated in your post). Hope you can help me out. I guess you have my email when I submit this comment right?

  2. Jason Neuman on September 10th, 2007

    Mapper Blog,

    Welcome to the site. I went ahead an updated the post with the steps since I’m sure others will want them also - just did not have time when I posted the article. - good luck on your install of Vanilla.

  3. Jason Neuman on September 10th, 2007

    Ok, I’ve integrated the new Vanilla forum tonight with the exception of one problem I found with the advance link location in the search. Please sign up and start using the new forum and get in on the first discussion I’ve started on the forum. :)

  4. james on September 11th, 2007

    Forum integration is kind of hard unless you pay some one to set it up for you. I know joomla can be used to wrap the forum with the joomla interface and others out there make apps that give you a homepage and the forum. Me I kind of went backwards with Open Road Biker dot com. I styled the forum the way I wanted it using the default theme and just changed some of the images, edited a few others, and worked in the style sheet a little. It took me quite some time because I had no idea what I was doing but it was worth it. I also had payed some one to do some of my buttons and the main image.
    Finally after using a horrible looking joomla template for some time I installed word press, found a theme that had all of the elements I was looking for and then went into the style sheet and started messing with stuff. I still need to tweek it a little but I think it is almost there. If you need some help jason just tell me what you need. I know how to add the links, change the colors and even edit some of the images to match your site.

  5. james on September 11th, 2007

    By the way, that would be for the smf program

  6. Jason Neuman on September 11th, 2007

    Thanks James but I decided to go with the Vanilla forum because it’s different and also has a css style sheet which is much easier to work with. Integration for look and feel took me three hours in total.

    Check it out and signup! Note new accounts have to have admin approval so there is not an automatic email until I approve the account.

  7. Life is Colourful on September 11th, 2007

    I chose phpBB over any other for my forum. I used one nice template and installed phpBB… may be because my host took care of installation and I needed to only take care of administration. How it goes with GoDaddy?

  8. Halifax mortgages on April 23rd, 2008

    hmm nice addition..
    i will gives us more help to add our comments in forum..thanks for sharing and adding it

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