Nov
09
2010

My First Vanilla Plugin

by   |  Posted in Downloads  |  11 comments

I have been fiddling around with Vanilla lately to prepare my support forum for a migrating over from bbPress. Vanilla is great and it offers tons of useful options that blow bbPress out of the water. Plus, it’s based in Montreal and I recently got to know the people behind it and they are totally awesome.

The learning curve on Vanilla is a little steep compared to bbPress, especially if you are unfamiliar with object oriented programming, but it is worth diving into. It took me a bit of time to wrap my head around it all but I managed to put together my first plugin to contribute back to the community.

In my support forum, I am often including code snippets to show exactly how to mod a file, and I like to have these snippets formatted a certain way. I prefer to use GeSHi to highlight my code so that it is easier to read and I don’t have to rely on a lot of extra JavaScript files. My first plugin allows Vanilla users to input code snippets using GeSHi by including their code between <pre> </pre> tag.

Here’s a screenshot to show you how it looks when you hover over a code snippet.

A sign of things to come in the Support Forum

I’ve included a small piece of jQuery to expand the code box, similar to how it functions on this site.

I’ve just uploaded the plugin to Vanilla so you can download it from there. Let me know if you have any questions or commeents.

Download

About the author:

A freelance web developer living in Montreal who spends most of his time writing for this site and building Premium themes for WordPress. You can find him on Twitter @bavotasan.

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Discussion 11 Comments

  1. client on November 10, 2010 at 6:23 am

    great, I waiting for the skin to vanilla from you :)
    I added your rss ;]

  2. Enrico on November 21, 2010 at 11:29 am

    Useful plugin. I’m looking @ vanilla forum as well.
    Could you please write a detailed tutorial to include WP header/footer into vanilla forum?
    Thanks.

    • c.bavota on November 21, 2010 at 11:59 am

      All you need to do it use the Vanilla Embed plugin and include it in a page template. Very simple.

    • Enrico on November 21, 2010 at 2:32 pm

      Thanks for the tip! I didn’t know about the embed plugin. I’m still new to vanilla and still playing with it. Sounds cool! :-)

    • Enrico on November 21, 2010 at 2:35 pm

      Oops…sounded too cool to be truth.
      http://vanillaforums.org/blog/embed-vanilla/
      If you right-click on a discussion and open it on a new window, the forum isn’t embedded anymore. :-(

    • c.bavota on November 22, 2010 at 11:09 am

      Well, of course. That kind of makes sense. You should let them know so that they could see if that is easily solve in an update. Drop them a line in their forum.

  3. Gouri on January 4, 2011 at 6:53 am

    I checked out your support forum. You seem to have moved to Vanilla. So how’z your experience been with it?

    • c.bavota on January 4, 2011 at 9:40 am

      It took a bit of time to figure it all out, but so far I find it amazing.

  4. Theo on January 14, 2011 at 3:49 am

    Nice one, thanks for sharing!

  5. Rohrreinigung Köln on January 24, 2011 at 8:13 am

    Pretty nice try! Looks good… I hope we can get some more Vanilla ‘candy’ from you the next time ;-)
    Keep up the good work!

  6. Rohrreinigung Köln on January 24, 2011 at 8:14 am

    EDIT: something wrong with the URL

    Pretty nice try! Looks good… I hope we can get some more Vanilla ‘candy’ from you the next time ;-)
    Keep up the good work!