Node.js | Burn after compiling

NodeBB v0.2.1 has been released

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB January 3, 2021 0 Comment

In a nutshell: DBAL, MongoDB as an alternative DB, Notification Enhancements, tons of new Plugins, Access Control, more Language packs!

Check out the official release blog post here. Have you liked NodeBB yet on Facebook? :)

Happy New Year! New year, new NodeBB release :). Quite a few features made it in as well as a bunch of bug fixes of course. I think the ones I’m really excited about are the notification based enhancements. It’s easy to miss out on notifications if you are viewing a different tab, or have the browser minimized, so we added a couple of features to make them more prominent.

First off, we added a notification counter in the favicon:

There’s a new plugin out called Desktop Notifications which alerts you of new @mentions, replies to your threads, new chat messages, etc. even if your browser is minimized. The only other app I know of that uses the HTML5 Notifications API is Gmail.

Interestingly enough, it works on mobile as well – sends you a push notification even if your browser is running in the background. Unfortunately, it seems like mobile browser support is fairly limited for now.

Click through to see what else was added in v0.2.1 :)

Writing Your First NodeBB Plugin

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB November 21, 2020 2 Comments

Since my last post about a month ago talking about the initial release of the NodeBB forums plugin system, we’ve had quite a few plugins written already. Now that the system is more mature, I thought I’d write a quick how-to guide for the aspiring plugin developer.

I’m going to use the NodeBB Youtube Plugin as an example – it’s a really simple addon that finds YouTube links in the post content and then embeds the Flash player inline.

Screenshot

So without further ado, lets get started. Click through to proceed to the guide. :)

Setting up a NodeBB Forum “for Dummies”

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB October 19, 2020 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. :)

Cash MOD for NodeBB

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB October 14, 2020 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!

Writing plugins for NodeBB

By Andrew Rodrigues in NodeBB October 9, 2020 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 October 8, 2020 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!