How to do Installation of Vanilla Forums

There are many alternatives to create a forum on the internet. One of the open source alternatives that are lightweight and easy to use is named as Vanilla Forums. Vanilla Forums is built on Garden Framework and PHP.

What’s interesting about Vanilla Forums is the simplicity and ease of use, especially for end users, so it is suitable for the type Vanilla forum “low moderated”. One big forum named as LowEndTalk is using Vanilla Forums.

Vanilla Forums Requirement

Requirements to build a forum using Vanilla itself is pretty standard. Here are the minimum requirements to install Vanilla Forum.

PHP 5.2.0

• PHP Configuration (php.ini): file_uploads = on
• PHP Data Objects module installed (http://www.php.net/pdo)
• PDO_MySQL module must be enabled (http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pdo-mysql.php)
• GD version 2.0 or newer hotel (optional, but required for profile pictures)
• CURL (to allow plugin sandboxing)

MySQL 5

Apache 2

• AllowOverride = All (optional, but it Allows friendly urls)
• mod_rewrite (optional, but it Allows friendly urls)

Vanilla Forums works on using the LAMP stack means Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

How to Install Vanilla Forums

1. LAMP Server

There are several ways we can have a LAMP server.

• Using Pre-build LAMP from providers
• Using the Automatic Script such as TuxLite
• Installing LAMP stack manually, as in the tutorial Here

In this example, we will use the pre-build templates LAMP stack of DigitalOcean , but the way the process is roughly the same for any computer. To DigitalOcean itself is easy enough.

• Log into your account our DigitalOcean
• Create droplets, droplet named our new
• Select the specifications and location of the droplet
• In the “Select Image”, select “Application” and “LAMP on Ubuntu”

When finished and login using SSH, we will be greeted with a welcome massage descriptions of our stack lamp, as the default location of the web server and MySQL password.

2. Vanilla Forums Files

To get the latest version of Vanilla, please go to the following page. Fill in your name and email address, then click the download now. Vanilla file itself is quite small with a size of 3-4 MB.

Once the download is complete, upload the file to the web server directory. In this example, the web server DigitalOcean directory is / var / www / html. The process could upload using FTP/SFTP client such as FileZilla etc.

Another alternative is to download Vanilla directly into your VPS, using the wget command.

wget http://vanillaforums.org/download/NamaVersiVanillaForums.zip

Once the file is uploaded, extract the file using the unzip command

Unzip nama_file_vanilla.zip

After the unzip process is complete, move all the files in the initial directory to the root directory of the web server by using the mv command.

mv / location / start / {*,. *} / locations / webserver /

After the change of ownership and file permissions with chown and chmod command.

chown-R root: root / location / webserver / *
chmod-R 777 / var / www / html / conf
chmod-R 777 / var / www / html / uploads
chmod-R 777 / var / www / html / cache

Note: The location / var / www / html / adjusted to the location of each server.

3. MySQL Database

To create a MySQL database using the terminal, follow these steps.

• Log into MySQL with the following command. Enter the MySQL password when prompted

mysql-u-p usernamemysql

• Create a database

CREATE DATABASE nameDatabase;

4. Access Vanilla Forums

By using a web browser, open the domain address of Vanilla Forums. If you do not have a domain name, can type in the IP of the server into the address bar.

We are greeted welcome screen, fill in the required data such as usernames and passwords, credential MySQL, etc. Then click Install.

And it’s done. We have finished the installation of Vanilla Forums and we can start using it.