Vineyard Canada

[Sesquipedalian]

The website for Vineyard Canada, https://www.vineyard.ca, is powered entirely by SMF 2.1 with some modifications and a custom theme.

Vineyard Canada is the Canadian branch of a Christian church denomination called the Vineyard. The vastness of the Canadian landscape means that our churches are far-flung, with the result that sheer geographical separation makes internal organizational communication a significant, ongoing challenge for us. When we recently redesigned our website, we knew that we needed a system that could address our need for a robust internal communications infrastructure, as well as providing a controlled-yet-flexible multiuser system for external communication (i.e. promotion, announcements, blog posts, etc.). We chose SMF because it can do all that, and do it well.


TL;DR: The Vineyard Canada site proves that when people say, "SMF can do everything you need for a forum, a blog, and/or an entire website," it's really true.


The most obvious customization is the theme. A great deal of work went into the graphical design, of course, but I suspect that most readers here in the Showcase board on simplemachines.org will be more interested in the structural changes that went into the theme than in the aesthetic aspects.

The top bar is fairly obviously a modified version of SMF 2.1 standard top bar. That by itself isn't very interesting until you look closer (but we'll get to that in a minute...)

Next comes the intro blurb and logo that guests see. (Logged in members are shown something more useful in that place, loosely modelled on the quick links in SMF 2.0's header area.)

That is followed by three coloured bands that present highlighted info. These are actually just SMF's standard news items, but specially formatted for display here. We always show exactly three bands. If we have more than three news items defined in the admin area, we grab three at random. If we have less than three, we grab some recent posts and put together previews of them to fill in those spaces instead.

After this we get to the meat of the content. In this section we are using a typical two-column layout. We've squeezed SMF's standard board index structure into the sidebar, and in the main content area we show previews of the first posts of topics created in certain boards. The result is a blog-like system where recent material that we want the public to see is prominently featured on the front page, without requiring people to first drill down into the different boards in order to find it. Note that this is not accomplished using any portal mod, but simply a custom-made function that hooks into SMF's standard BoardIndex.php and a template in our custom theme that handles the data that this function generates.

If you go into a board or a topic, you will see that the same two column layout is used in those as well. We also turned many of SMF's button rows into dropdown menus in the sidebar.

Speaking of menus, an astute observer might have noticed that SMF's main menu bar (Home, Search, etc.) does not appear anywhere. Instead, we've broken up the main menu and incorporated the individual buttons into the top bar in different ways. The Calendar button is an obvious one. The logo on the top left functions as the Home button. The Search and Members buttons have been incorporated into the dropdown search menu item in the top bar. The Logout button (for logged in users) has been moved into the user dropdown menu. The Admin and Moderate buttons appear (for the relevant users) as icons next to the Alerts and Messages icons (which appear in the same place that guests see "Sign in"). (See attached for an image of what the menu bar looks like for an admin.)

There are more customizations that went into our theme than these, but that's a good list for now.

Finally, we are also using a number of mods, many of which were written by me. I plan to release most of those here on simplemachines.org once SMF 2.1 exits beta development.

[SaltedWeb]

Quite interesting, I am still soaking it in but quite impressive.

[Steve]

What he said.

[Biology Forums]

I love the URL, how did you land something like that?

[br360]

Very unique and very impressive. Nicely done

[Sesquipedalian]

Thanks, everyone. 

I love the URL, how did you land something like that?

We first registered vineyard.ca back in 2000 or so, I believe.

[Biology Forums]

Figured, because a URL like that could probably be sold to a wine company now for a decent return.

I like the website, but I can't seem to navigate to the boards on mobile. It's an unconventional "forum", but I'm assuming that's what you were aiming for. Nonetheless, I don't want that to take away from the cool factor, because it is cool.

I like it more on desktop than on mobile.

[Sesquipedalian]

I like the website, but I can't seem to navigate to the boards on mobile.

Yeah, on mobile you need to keep scrolling down past all the featured posts in order to get to the actual board index. That's because the front page is aimed more at guests than at registered users, so content needs to come before infrastructure.

It's an unconventional "forum", but I'm assuming that's what you were aiming for. Nonetheless, I don't want that to take away from the cool factor, because it is cool.

Yes. Blurring the line between between forum and blog is the goal here. Some boards behave in a more blog-like fashion, and others in a more typically forum-like one. There's still the sidebar design in both cases, but certain behaviours are tailored to one use or the other depending on the use that the given board is designated for.

[Nibogo]

That's just beautiful, splendid site

[radu81]

You did a nice job, congrats 

[xdresser]

Maybe it's just me but I don't see any forum on the website.

[Kindred]

it is just you.   The entire site is using SMF as a core. the boards and messages are just a minor part of the site (

[vbgamer45]

Just to add I would look into support HTTP 2.0 for speed/performance reasons on SSL.

[Biology Forums]

Just to add I would look into support HTTP 2.0 for speed/performance reasons on SSL.

How did you know it's not being used?

[vbgamer45]

I check the headers in the request using browser developer tools.

[nidec]

That is one very nice site, way beyond my abilities

[peterbehlendorf]

I'm a fan of the vibrant colours, loads pretty quickly too.

[AlanDewey]

I am quite impressed !   

Very good looking site and easy to use.  I like that it does not look like a forum (younger people have a strong reluctance to use forums.)

I am curious why you used subdomains?     formation.vineyard.ca   emerge.vineyard.ca    etc.

[Antechinus]

I like that it does not look like a forum...

It definitely doesn't. I couldn't even find the forum. Where is it?

[Arantor]

The whole thing *is* the forum. Just some parts reskinning the forum to be more blog-like.

https://formation.vineyard.ca/ is a board inside the forum for example, or perhaps more accurately it smells like an instance of something akin to dougiefresh's split forums mod, showing different categories/boards as mini-sites but it's all an SMF under the hood.

The use of subdomains isn't a new thing to do with boards/categories/parts of the site, but it's *really* hard to make it something in the core software as it's way too easy to break and way too complex for most people to sensibly set up on their own hosting (as ideally, you want a star DNS record)