Please welcome the new forum
Tasty forum goodness!
I’ve gone ahead and replaced phpBB with a Vanilla-powered forum instead. The old Sword & Shield, with its pretty — but visually distinct — template is still there, but will remain locked down for the foreseeable future.
In its place: the new Sword & Shield. Which, you will notice, is quite nicely integrated right into Aiera, as opposed to being a more-or-less standalone entity. That was actually one of the key elements that drew me to Vanilla; the ease with which it could be integrated into a WordPress page.
There was one other feature which also seemed relevant; Vanilla forums can integrate with WordPress to share user accounts, theoretically enabling “single sign-on” capability. What that means — should mean — is that if you log in to Aiera with your username and password, you should be automagically logged in to the forum when you visit it. (You might have to re-enter your credentials the first time you visit, but not every time thereafter.)
Drawbacks: at present, only signed-in users can see forum topics or post topics and replies. I’m working on figuring out how to enable public viewing, if not public posting. (I assume a plugin is required for this.)
And let’s be fair: the forum is a bit simplistic in comparison to phpBB, and also is in need of a bit of a layout overhaul. I’ll get to that when I can; for now, I’m just glad I have what I hope will be a workable solution to the forum issue in place.
Anyhow, please do try to access the forum once you have logged in to Aiera; report any errors or issues in the comments to this post.
Note: If you had a login at the old forum, that login SHOULD now be a valid Aiera login, and so work in this context.
And lastly, but most importantly: Don’t create a new forum account; log in with your WordPress account and LINK it to the forum. (Thanks, Dominus.)
Hmm, I’m not logged in as any user and I can read all of the threads just fine. Can’t post though.
Site is awfully slow…
Couldn’t login to the forum.
First it asked me whether I want to sign in or link an existing account with email account question (instead of username/password that the site uses).
I used sign in with my registered email and password, got forwarded to a sign in with username and password (with my actually username pre filled in). Then when signing in on this it timed out.
Now the forum lets me see stuff, but titles me stranger and I can’t get to the sign in. You’re probably tweaking while I’m trying… 🙂
No, it would appear that I encountered a bug. Or, more probably, buggered something up. Can’t seem to log in at all.
I think I know what I did wrong, though…maybe I can back it out.
Jason: Yeah, I managed to fix that. Not the anonymous posting issue, though.
Okay, try it again, Dominus. I think I’ve smoothed out the issue(s). Apparently, users by default DON’T have sign-in clearance.
Hey guys,
Thanks to switching over to Vanilla! If you have any issues make sure to send us an email at support(a)vanillaforums(dot)com.
Also, we just released v2.0.17 yesterday and fixed a bunch of bugs, and added a ton of new features, including, wordpress plugins and widgets (http://vanillaforums.com/blog/news/vanilla-wordpress-plugins-and-widgets/).
-Brendan, Vanilla Forums
Hey Brendan…thanks for dropping by, and thanks for the update! I’ll have a look at installing v2.0.17 when I get a moment here.
And I’ll check out some of those widgets…might be useful.
Hey wtf Dragon I can’t link my account to the forums. Each time I do it says there is no account with that password or email (and that’s my wordpress password and my wordpress email which I also use to log in on the main page).
Another thing is that when I’m at the forum as a Stranger, each time I push the ‘sign in’ button nothing happens… it keeps redirecting me to the same page (the one with all the topics).
I will investigate.
Thanks for the heads-up, Natreg.
Update: Natreg, you seem to have a valid user account at the forum. If you like, I can try delete this user and let you re-try accessing the forum.
Wait, I have two accounts?
which one are you refering for deleting?
Well, technically, you have just one account; the forum shows an account for you as well once it has noted that you’ve logged in from WordPress.
So basically, I’m suggesting that I could try deleting that account from the forum (not your WordPress user account) and seeing if my doing so allows you to access the forum after a new attempt.
And if not, I’ll ask the Vanilla people what the trouble could be.
Ok then. Do that and we’l see if it works 🙂
Ok, I don’t know if you did anything in the end, but it works now 🙂
I did delete you from the forum, so let’s say that was the issue. 😉
Glad it worked this time.
Well, a little late now, I suppose, but you know the WordPress people make a forum software that meshes right into WP, right? 🙂
Yeah, bbPress. I used it once, didn’t care for it. Gonna try this one for a while…seems promising.
Well, bbPress has its upsides and downsides. It integrates right in to WP, but it leaves most of the design work to the end user.
There is that as well.
Honestly, it’s been over a year since I looked at bbPress’ development. I thought they had mostly stopped work on it, in fact.
Goes a lot slower than WordPress, but it still goes. I like that you can pretty much drop it into WP and the admin suite is pretty powerful without being the unwieldly thing that the PHPBB ACP can be these days.
But its pretty minimalist as far as design goes. The only real plus is that most WP themes need only small modifications to work, but if you’re looking to get fancier than that, then it can get complicated – as WP can – very quick.
Never tried Vanilla forums. Might give it a whirl next time I have an excuse to play with forumsoft.
Well, Vanilla seems to be working well for now, apart from the lag. I’m trying to mitigate that, but I need to find a working caching plugin for it. Maybe gzip compression, too…or as an alternative.
I’ll consider bbPress if I get fed up with Vanilla, but for now I rather like it. It is also minimalist and rather simple in its setup, but…eh, no complaints. Yet.
Still can`t link my site account for forum. Wrote “The name you entered is already in use by another member”. Old forum password also do not work (and i cant enter my old login, only e-mail)
Okay. I’m going to assume you’re having similar troubles to what Natreg experienced, and I’ll try the same solution.
Forum do not work for me. Write that: Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘/nfs/c03/h03/mnt/55109/domains/ultimaaiera.com/html/vanilla/applications/controllers/class.controller.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/php-5.2.14-2/share/pear’) in /nfs/c03/h03/mnt/55109/domains/ultimaaiera.com/html/vanilla/library/core/class.dispatcher.php on line 531
Oh, for dumb…I’m getting fed up with this. I wonder what the heck went “bonk” now?
Thanks for pointing it out. I’ll see what I can do.