Awards (Badges) for Vanilla Forums 2.0

Awards/Badges Plugin adds gamification features to your self-hosted Vanilla Forum, by allowing you to create Badges and assign them to Users based on a combination of criteria. The plugin supports virtually unlimited Badges, and each Badge is fully configurable, both in terms of look and in terms of assignment criteria.

Main Features

Support for Award Classes

A feature unique to this plugin is the support for Award Classes. You can use them to group the Awards/Badges in Classes and let your Users understand which ones are the easiest to get, and which ones require more effort. With Classes, you are no longer limited to a flat list of Badges.

Support for unlimited, customisable Awards/Badges

You can configure as many Awards/Badges as you need and customise them as you wish. Award names, classes, descriptions, images, scores and assignment rules are fully configurable.

Awards/Badges tracking

The plugin uses Vanilla’s database to persist them and keep track of the Users who earned them. You don’t have to worry about the time required to process the Awards: processing occur after the main content has been delivered to the User. Besides, when a User earns an Award, such event is recorded, so that the same Award won’t be processed twice, effectively reducing the amount of data to process.

Flexible and Extensible Rules System

The Awards Plugin implements a flexible Rule system, which can support as many rules as you may need. While the plugin is supplied with several Core rules, you can create new ones to fit your needs, and even override existing ones.

Creating new Rules is straightforward. You can use the included Sample Rule as a guideline, then copy your brand new rule in rules/core directory. The plugin will automatically pick it up, and it will be ready for you to use.

We also provide a Rule development service, for when you don’t have the time or skills to develop one yourself. If you wish to have a custom Rule created for you, please contact us, and we will get back to you with a quote.

Several Rules included

The plugin provides the following Rules, out of the box:

• Anniversary. Checks User’s Anniversary of Registration general user core/anniversaryrule.
• Likes. Checks the amount of “Likes” received by the User general content core/likesrule.
• Photogenic. Checks if User uploaded a Profile Picture general user core/photogenicrule.
• Post Count. Checks User’s Post count general content core/postcountrule.
• QnA (Questions & Answers) Checks the “Accepted Answers” that the User has given or received general content core/qnarule.
• Thanks. Checks “Thanks” received by the User general content core/thanksrule.
• User Roles. Checks if a User has one or more Roles general user core/userrolesrule.

Additionally, a Sample Rule is provided to illustrate how to develop new ones.

Integration with Vanilla’s Activity and Notification system

Every time a User earns an Award/Badge, the event is recorded in Vanilla’s Activity, and Users are notified of it by email and/or by a pop-up message on the forum itself. Notifications can be turned off by Users, if they wish.

Import/Export of Awards and Award Classes

An interface will be implemented to import and export Awards and Awards Classes with a few clicks. This will allow the creation of Award Sets which can be easily moved from one site to another, or distributed for 3rd party use.

Requirements

• PHP 5.3+
• Vanilla Forums 2.0 (plugin has not been tested on Vanilla 2.1)
• Logger Plugin 13.02.01 or newer (either Basic or Advanced version)
• Aelia Foundation Classes 13.04.26 or newer