Installing Vanilla Forum CMS on your system

Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable discussion forum for the web.With over 450 plugins so far, Vanilla is ideal for custom community solutions. Vanilla has been adopted by over 300,000 businesses, brands, and fans.

How to install vanilla forum on your system?

This is the quickstart guide for installing Vanilla, aimed at people that are used to working with websites, PHP and databases.

Step 1 : Create you database name on your mysql. Create a database and a full-access database user for that database. Run the Command Prompt on the start run button and type cmd. On the Command Prompt, type the command C:\>mysql -u root -p and Enter root password. Entering the mysql database. Type the command as  below :

mysql>create database mdpro;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

Step 2 : Step 2 : Extract all the file that you've already download from the mdpro website into the C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs

step 3 : Installing Fresh. If you are creating a brand new installation of Vanilla, all you need to do is upload all of the Vanilla files to your server. Once you are finished uploading, open this file in your web browser and click the install link below.

step 4 : Vanilla Installation Wizard. This wizard will first check can been installed.

step 5 : Vanilla Installation Wizard. Create your new Vanilla database, and specify the MySQL connection parameters below.

step 6 : Vanilla Installation Wizard. Now let’s set up your administrative account for Vanilla. Up next we’ve got to set up the support contact information for your forum. This is what people will see when emails go out from the system for things like password retrieval and role changes. The cookie domain is where you want cookies assigned to for Vanilla. Typically the cookie domain will be something like www.yourdomain.com. Cookies can be further defined to a particular path on your website using the "Cookie Path" setting. (TIP: If you want your Vanilla cookies to apply to all subdomains of your domain, use ".yourdomain.com" as the cookie domain).

step 7 : Vanilla Installation Wizard (Complete).That’s it! Vanilla is set up and ready to go. Before you start inviting your friends in for discussions, there are a lot of other things you might want to set up. The #1 thing on your list should be getting some add-ons for Vanilla. With add-ons you can do all sorts of cool things like:

* Allow your users to save their common searches
* Change the language, layout, and style of your forum
* Add Atom and RSS feeds to your forum
* Allow users to quote other users in discussions

You’ll also want to fine-tune your application settings, like:

* Change the number of discussions or comments per page
* Allow the public to browse your forum without an account
* Create new roles with various different permissions
* Create new categories, and even limit which roles get to access them

All of these configuration options (and many more) are available in the settings tab of your Vanilla forum.

Step 8 : This is your vanilla forum. Enjoy  using vanilla forum.