New Vaadin Forum is live, what do you think?

We’ve just deployed a new version of Tori, the Vaadin Liferay forum. We know it’s 100 times more awesome than bacon and rockets but how do you like it? Is something broken that used to work before? What is the number one enhancement thingy?

Tori is open source so fork it, write your tickets/issues, commit patches and go crazy at
https://github.com/vaadin/tori

One thing I’m missing is marking already read posts in the Recent Posts screen.

I miss last post author in the list of topics.

You can see the latest author if you hover over the time of last post.

Yes, but I would prefer to see it without any action. More over mouse pointer must be in narrow part of the component.

Tori now also available through
Liferay Marketplace
so you can easily install it in your own Liferay instance.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to find out the exact date and time something was posted anymore; IIRC it used to be that you could hover over the humanized version?

Yes, this was a design decision during the creation of Tori. Prettytime is prettier and saves the [hassle of timezones]
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY).

Please create a feature requests at https://github.com/vaadin/tori/issues

Hello Team,

I find the following things missing from the previous forum

  1. Access to “myPosts” similar to “Recent Posts” on top of the forum.To Access MyPosts I have to explictly goto forum and then I get MyPosts
  2. Last modifed time and the individual who modified it is not being shown, instead the thread owner and the created time is being displayed in the list. This makes it hard to judge if any reply was received. To check I have to enter the thread and check for posts.
  3. I personally feel it to be a bit slow while accessing the urls directly (it redirects me to the forum page, then to list of threads and then the post itself)

Thanks,
Krishna

Hi, do you mean the list view of posts? There is currently in the right-most column the latest time somebody replied to the post and to the left of that the amount of posts. Eg. here:
https://vaadin.com/forum/#!/category/11558
Did I misunderstand your point?

Maybe you all are used to it by now, but I don’t like the #00B4F0 color for the links. I think the color is too difficult to read. I think I understand why the color was chosen – but that doesn’t make it an easy color for reading.

Just to try it, I changed the color definition for “.v-app .v-link span, .v-app a” to red – what an improvement!

  1. Is there a way I can configure the forum to display links in my preferred color – or even better – let my browser choose what color to use for links?

  2. Is there a way I can permanently change the above CSS definition in my Chrome browser when I’m reading the forum? The change would have to apply only to the vaadin.com domain – all other sites I use don’t have this problem.

Hello Fredrik,

Currently we have last modified time, but we don’t have who modified it. Assume the following use case,

Step 1: I start thread
Step 2: Some one has replied to it
Step 3: I go to the list view
Step 4: I wish to see whether anyone has commented on my post lately. Instead of me going to the post and checking who posted last.

Also, it would great if you integrate “Following” service with “Notifications” on the top. Just like stackoverflow

There’s a Chrome plugin for that exact purpose called
Stylebot

Perfect! Thank you!

The granularity of the CSS in the forum lets me change the color of links in messages while leaving the author’s names in the left margin the original forum color.

You can hover over the timestamp to see who the author was. I was suspecting this might be a poor design choice (clean appearance over usability), and it’s starting to look like it. I did a quick “unsolicited” redesign of the list view. Please comment!

This was part of the design from the very beginning, but we just haven’t gotten there yet. So I guess I can only say, be patient, it’s coming :slight_smile:

Hello Jouni Koivuviita.

The design seems to be fine. It does brings the point home :slight_smile:

Hmmm will be eagerly waiting for it.

Is there something that you can do with respect to the following?

It was there in the old forum but not on the new one :frowning:

I’ve installed this from Liferay Marketplace on a local copy of 6.2GA2 and it seems to work fine as long as there isn’t a Vaadin 6 portlet on the same page, which I guess is expected? It’s unfortunate that it seems to be completely decoupled from the current Liferay theme. Is there a way to change this other than rebuilding from source? My main question though is what did you need to do to make the portlet self contained wrt the version of Vaadin bundled with Liferay?

Hi Joseph.
To change the appearance of Tori you don’t necessarily need to rebuild it from source. Another option would be to add custom css with stronger selectors on the same page. That might of course be somewhat more laborious than modifying the sass template/variables.

Vaadin portlets can be made self-contained by overriding
getStaticFileLocation()
-method in VaadinPortletService to return request.getContextPath() instead of the default location. This advices the portlet to retrieve all the static resources from the portlet deployment path.

Currently this is considered more a hack than an officially recommended way to make Vaadin portlets but it does make the installation process quite a lot simpler :slight_smile: I guess the biggest risk in this approach are the possible conflicts (that you also experienced) if placed on the same page with other Vaadin portlets.

Tomi

Thanks. I understand it isn’t a best practice, but Liferay 6.2 is still shipping with Vaadin 6, which is being deprecated next month, and Liferay Vaadin Plugin seems to have stalled before making it to Liferay Marketplace upgraded to 6.2. Any port in a storm, I say.

When user has disabled cookies completely in the browser, accessing the forum results in an infinite reload loop of the page.