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Theme Styling and Good Practices
CSS is a language that is employed by almost every developer for some purpose. Moreover, it is the language where typically it's taken for granted. It’s powerful and has several nuances that may facilitate (or damage) your theme styles. The readability of your CSS is incredibly important, though most people…
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Theme Boilerplate
This article is for Opensource clients or Enterprise clients with Theme Pull Vanilla provides a boilerplate to build custom themes. It contains all files necessary for a theme with customizable styles. Styles are written in SASS and most of it bases itself in SASS variables and inheritance. Variables are carried through…
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Setting up Keystone Theme
Here are simple steps to follow to set up your Keystone theme 1. Enable Keystone: Keystone is now Vanilla's default theme. If you're a new customer, it's likely enabled already. If not, navigate to the Theme section of your Dashboard-Settings and select Keystone. 2. Pick your Theme Options When you enable Keystone, you'll…
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Avatars
Here are the Vanilla options for displaying profile photos. Default Avatars In the Dashboard under Appearance > Avatars you can set a default image that will display if a user does not upload a profile photo. Here are a few samples that you can use (ctrl + click to save) : On this page, you’ll also see a setting that will…
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Promoted Content Module
Have you ever wanted to promote content to your community based on an author's Role or Rank (or something else)? The Promoted Content module let's you do that easily, so you can have something like this: Here are some heavily themed examples, some of the more complex theming seen here would require a professional web…
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How to Set Up a Custom Font
Loading the fonts There are 2 methods to load the fonts. You only need one of the two. Method A: Self hosting fonts If you're self hosting your fonts, you'll need to convert them to multiple formats. Nowadays 2 should suffice, but you'll be sure it can be used by a bigger percentage of your users. There are services out…
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Leaderboards
Overview Leaderboards show how many points users got during the week, the month and/or all-time. Users can earn points in a few different ways: Other users positively reacting to their posts Answering questions & having their answers accepted (if this option is enabled in Q&A settings) Receiving Badges Leaderboards are…
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Search Engine Optimizations
Vanilla subscribes to common sense, vetted principles for improving the findability of your site and its content. We employ no “tricks” because we believe they ultimately hurt your traffic and reputation. Curation Having a team dedicated to the curation of your forum is critical to its success. Concisely edited discussion…
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Hero Image
Overview This plugin provides an easy way to have a custom background image for every page of the forum. It allows you to upload this image in the dashboard and access it through a Smarty Template or Customize Theme. It also allows you override the main image on a per-category basis. A category can optionally have its own…
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Accessibility in Product Design
Overview We strive for maximum accessibility in our product design and take defects in it seriously. ‘508 Compliance’ refers to a US law that requires that US government websites to be accessible to persons with disabilities (e.g. visual or physical impairment). Accessibility means, among many other things, that a person…