Setting up a NodeBB Forum “for Dummies”

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB 17 Comments

(Not a “dummy”? Head over to our wiki for advanced installation instructions.)



So I’ve been wanting to write a NodeBB setup guide for someone with pretty much no development experience at all – potentially somebody who’s never even seen a terminal in their life. I’m hoping it will reduce the barrier of entry for those wishing to try NodeBB out.

This guide will be using Digital Ocean* – but pretty much any host that gives you shell access will do. Digital Ocean is only $5 a month, which is as cheap as it gets for a host with SSH.

*DISCLAIMER: That’s a referral link, so if you spend $10 I’ll earn as much. Will spend it on more servers of course, because you can never have enough of ‘em. Thanks! :)

So on to the fun stuff. Click through for the installation guide complete with noob-friendly screenshots. :)

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Monetizing your NodeBB forum with AdSense

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB 2 Comments

I wrote a really simple sidebar plugin today for NodeBB called NodeBB AdSense. With this plugin you can embed AdSense scripts into the sidebar to monetize your site.

To be fair its nothing more than an example plugin to demonstrate how to add a snippet of JS/HTML to the category view’s sidebar. Hopefully in the future we can do something more cooler with that, perhaps a small editor in the ACP to modify the ad dimensions or scheme. Maybe something like this adsense generator – but a little bit more cooler looking ;)

Click through for screenshots and installation instructions.

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Cash MOD for NodeBB

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB 0 Comment

This weekend I thought I’d buckle down and get crackin’ on some NodeBB plugins. I figured that over the next little while I’ll write a few plugins that I’ve been accustomed to using over the years with other forum software. This will give me a chance to find potential flaws in the plugin system and also give me the opportunity to set up various hooks in important places in the core.

More importantly, with a few skeleton plugins for people to look at, I’m hoping we can garner some interest in it from third-party developers.

I’m happy to say that I’ve released my first NodeBB plugin on NPM. Well… it’s actually my third, but the other two are “tutorial” plugins (check them out: Sample Admin Page and Sample Static Page).

So on to the fun stuff. The Cash MOD for NodeBB is a points plugin which awards the user virtual currency every time they post. They get more points per character typed, which gives the user a bit of an incentive to write higher quality posts. It isn’t a fully featured points addon yet – for example, we ought to have an ACP panel to modify user’s points – but the basics are all in (feel like improving it? fork it! :)).

Does this mean we could see an RPG addon built for NodeBB? Perhaps a port of ADR from phpBB? Or how about an Avatar system like Nulavatar? Man, that would be pretty cool… maybe one day after NodeBB development comes to the end of the roadmap I should really take a crack at it.

Click through to see screenshots of the Cash MOD in action!

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Writing plugins for NodeBB

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB 2 Comments

Julian from Design Create Play wrote a wiki article on how to write plugins for NodeBB. The plugins system as a whole is a pretty barebones module which we will work on improving as time goes on. That said, there are already quite a few plugins available which are installable via npm.

A third party plugin for parsing BBCode by adarqui is already under development, which is pretty exciting. Hopefully we can see more NodeBB plugins from developers as time progresses.

German translation for NodeBB

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB 0 Comment

NodeCode, a German node.js portal wrote an article about NodeBB. Check it out here.

They’ve submitted a language translation pack for NodeBB which can be found on Github. The internationalization module is still a work in progress but its great to see that people are already interested in translating our forum software to other languages.

Danke NodeCode!

CBC’s Over the Rainbow

By Andrew Rodrigues in Projects 0 Comment

Possibly one of the most unique applications I’ve ever worked on. Over the Rainbow was an “American Idol”-esque TV show contest on CBC.

Our job was to create a mobile game (iOS/Android) that allowed the user to control the fate of contestants singing live on television. Pretty cool stuff.

Anybody using the app could vote for their favourite singer, and the crystal ball on live TV would change colour depending on how their performance was rated. You can see that in action in the video:

Click through to find out more about the game…

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