Paul's forum and Vanilla ...

Wondering if Paul G. is still projecting the world’s Best Ever Forum by the end of the year? Memo to Paul - never offer even a tentative time frame

I know integration with Vanilla stalled a bit due to user table/database kludginess in the ’fit’. Still, Vanilla integration (one-way will do) would be a tight second-best, if not first-best, for me and perhaps many users. Any hope for crashing the bumps that occurred there?

Vanilla is a key piece of software for nearly everything I do. It is simply ideal for nudging ’ordinary people’ into conversation without their noticing the noodge. A nifty TextPattern plug-in gets me far enough, though I would prefer MODx.

I think you can arrange Jot to do what Vanilla does.

Jot just lacks in creating a first post, AFAIK. IOW "Post a new topic" thing.

It has pre-moderation.
It has subscription, both for moderators and users.
It has IP logging.
It has additional fields support. (which I don’t think can be found in other free scripts as per my experience)
It has total css based 100% customization of layout.
It has pagination support.
It has pblish/unpublish support.
...and list goes and goes on .. http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Jot

:)

@kudolink:
Well, perhaps, but why spend dozens of hours - for me - to replicate some of the features (and probably none of the hundreds of add-ons) plus test, enhance, doc, etc. rather than leverage the support of a highly creative Vanilla user community working with tuned, elegant code specialized for forums?

I’m not being sarcastic; it’s a sincere question. I think (my) life is too short (e.g., not enough incentive). I can see why others could feel incented.

Also, it is one thing to produce features; another to deliver something that ’fits’. MODx ’fits’ CMS. IMHO, Vanilla fits light-weight but powerful forum requirements to perfection. It took 100% focused development for Vanilla over two years to reach its present finished, yet early-in-its-life-cycle, shape. I don’t get the idea Paul has that kind of passion for a MODx forum or shares the same vision for it as Vanilla. No shame in that.

@zi (and kudolink)
I will gladly take a closer look at Jot (which is cool), though I don’t believe it changes the substance of the matter for me. But then I’m not a developer. Vanilla has nearly all the features you list (pre-moderation is noodling along), including the ones on the wiki - and many more. But it’s not really a feature thing per se, as I mention above.

Rolling my own ersatz forum, even if powerful, loses me the leverage I get from Vanilla’s dynamic developer and user community. And its developer is one smart and elegant hacker. Just as FYI, Mozilla will be adopting Vanilla as its developer community forum, minimally. I hear a raft of hitherto unplanned improvements already made behind the scenes may be available to all Vanilla users soon.

Net net, I still feel MODx will miss an opportunity if it doesn’t integrate. Vanilla and SMF integrations will cover between them 90% of the spectrum desired by nearly any community for forums.

Jot does not have the user management tools that a forum has. MODx actually might not be the end-all-be-all solution for every problem and I’m quite OK with that.

Ryan, I think instead that MODx gives us great power, because you can mix up things to achieve very complex results.
Zi, I know what you mean because I was thinking the same but with NewsPublisher you can create pages, no?

It’s always a matter of getting the most from tools we have at hand.

@RussLipton: the good thing is if you learn to use Jot you’ll never need to learn it another time. Well, if I hear you’d like to use Vanilla I don’t think you’re looking for features.
Aside that I for sure hope in integration of Vanilla, but I only think you can do without it without great losses.

Yea, when Jot get’s that planned Threading feature, it’s pretty much the Forum snippet that Paul was talking about..

I do very much appreciate the suggestions to dig into Jot; I definitely will. I find that I ’get’ some MODx snippets and such fairly quickly. Others leave me with my mouth open going .... ’uhhh ..... ;-).

I sure do agree it is great to leverage stuff across multiple uses, once understood. Integrations, by definition, leaves wires showing, and need sufficient arguments in defense. Assuming I ’get’ Jot, I may be back with some targeted questions.

I will work out the threading and a dedicated basic forum mode for Jot in the near future. I do want to keep things as basic as possible for Jot, but by providing the customization it would be possible to achieve almost anything

Only just saw this thread. If you ever want to bring my attention to anything, particularly over the weekend, send me a PM.

I can say that I probably won’t be doing anything more with Vanilla, I’m not a fan of Vanilla and really do not have the same vision at all. Which, given that Vanilla exists is not an issue. People can of course feel free to learn from the experience of integrating the two, but I think you can’t get much further without starting to rewrite parts of Vanilla. And given that it does naff all, I don’t understand the point.

I did put plans on hold to see how Jot turns out, and will be digging into it and talking to bS about things very soon. Jot looks great.

Most of the concepts that I have will be handled by the "first post" and revolve around that piece of the jigsaw (even key moderator actions like Move Post, Split Thread and Merge Posts will revolve around a document ID).

I do have passion for a forum, but I don’t intend to spend 2 years writing one. I certainly don’t plan to spend 2 years writing a standalone app - which is what Vanilla is. And some of the bits that I want to write don’t (AFAIK) exist in any forum out there. At least not the way I want them to be done. So rather than create an add-on for SMF / Vanilla / phpBB, I’m looking to get it rolling in MODx.

The other jigsaw piece that looks interesting is PPP.