Posts

Support closure for Bank Holiday

Support dept will be closed on 3rd of June 2013, as it is a Bank Holiday in Ireland. Any query received that day will be dealt with on Tuesday, 4th of June 2013.

Post Scheduler and Hot Threads Plugins have been updated

As indicated in the title, the following Plugins for Vanilla Forums have been updated. Please download the latest version to make sure you get all the new features and bug fixes.

Post Scheduler

  • Fixed bug in filtering of Scheduled Discussions. The bug allowed unauthorised Users to see Scheduled Discussions when clicking on a Category.

Hot Threads

  • Added weighing of Discussions’ age to prevent stale Discussions with a high “hot” score from appearing in the Hot Discussions list forever.

To get the latest versions, simply click on the download link(s) that you received when you purchased the plugins. New purchases will automatically receive the latest version.

New Release – Steam ™ Sign In Plugin for Vanilla 2.0

Steam ™ Sign In Plugin for Vanilla 2.0 is now available for purchase. This simple plugin allows your Users to register and log on your forum using their Steam ™ profile. This plugin relies on the OpenID plugin which is shipped with Vanilla.

Important

The OpenID plugin shipped with Vanilla contains a bug which doesn’t allow Users to enter an Email address to associate with their forum account. A fix is being discussed on Vanilla Community, but it’s unofficial. Use it at your risk.

Birthday Discount!

From 16/11/2012 at 7.10 AM (GMT), you can avail of a 10% discount on the total of your shopping, by using coupon code HAPPYBDAY-1211. Discount is available for just 24 hours, and for the first 10 purchases. After all, birthday comes only once a year! 🙂

Code != Clothing, or How to neatly structure your code

Having been worked with countless technologies , frameworks  and 3rd party libraries, I can say that I have seen almost every possible way of organising the code for a project. From the approach of putting every file in a single folder “just for now” (where “now” becomes “forever”, because moving things around is just too complicated), to the one of creating humongous, monolithic do-everything libraries (which I nicknamed “walls of code”), to have everything is in one place, to the theoretically more rational modular system, where files are organized in sub-folders.

The reason why I stress the word “theoretically” is that, while the idea is certainly good, it can still lead to a messy, hard to maintain mass of files. The key of everything, in this case, is finding what logic should be used to structure the code. It may seem a simple question to answer, but the way one answers to it can lead to nasty surprises. Read more