Hey and welcome on... wait... you've been six months around already as you say
Just Hey then

Here is a list that comes to my mind:

Programming Languages, Frameworks, etc.

Plugins

• GIT - if you want a VCS for your work (you're free to use any other of cause but I highly recommend GIT)
• JavaScript (or any super-language that compiles into javascript)
• JSON - even so it's an essential part of javascript I mention it once more since it gets used a lot for configuration-files, etc.
• Node.js globals - for the very start modules is the most important. Some other important ones ain't important for most NodeBB plugins/themes but for own node.js projects they will be (path, process, file system)
• NPM basics most importantly the Getting started section to be able to use npm on command-line (GNU/Linux). I don't know anything about usage of NPM in MS Windows. The package.json structure is also important.
• Some stuff from the NodeBB docs - especially the Writing Plugins for NodeBB section

Some NPM modules in detail:

• Grunt / Gulp is always a good thing to know about, you only need it for NodeBB module-dev if you're using testing or a super-language that compiles into js thought
• Bower is always a good thing to know about, you don't need it for NodeBB module-dev thought
• socket.io communication basics - for communication between server-side js and client-side js
• winston - server-side logging if you need to, not much to learn thought
• ... depends on targeted functionality

Example: https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-plugin-quickstart

Widgets (additionally)

• LESS - it's basically CSS with nested selectors allowed, every valid CSS is valid LESS
• Bootstrap - there has been at least one 3rd-party effort to add support for some other framework alike thought, not sure about the status since I like bootstrap
• psychobunny's templates.js syntax and usage

Example (@julian for consistency a nodebb-widget-quickstart would be great https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-widget-essentials

Themes (additionally)

• You can consider using a Bootswatch "skin" before starting customization

Example: https://github.com/NodeBB/nodebb-theme-quickstart

Development Environment

Operating System

I generally recommend GNU/Linux since it's clearly the superior OS with more clean command-line.
Anyways you're free to use any other OS as long as you can install

IDE

Whatever you want.
I prefer Webstorm but it's not freeware (and vim for fast changes )...
Many others seem to prefer Sublime Text.
Search for it here on board, there have been some threads about it...

Workspace

As mentioned above Grunt or Gulp are the tools of choice for task automatization (e.g. compilation of CoffeeScript into JavaScript whenever a .coffee-file changes).

Database

NodeBB has core support for Redis and mongoDB (and levelDB if I'm right, would need to check source to ensure... ...nevermind, dropped support long ago) - even so mongoDB gets used key-value like instead of fully featuring it's power.

These are NoSQL (Not Only SQL) Databases, thus it's not recommended to actually access them using SQL commands.

But in general you won't need to access the databases directly for most plugins since there is a Settings Framework that may store plugin-dependent data and for common storage-additions there is support within the appropriate Hook-definition.

Design / UX Tools

I don't need anything other than chromium development-tools (browser console, DOM manipulation, etc.).
You may consider using a color-selection page (like http://paletton.com/) for neat color-composition.

etc.

• Much practice with JavaScript and Node.js especially
• Learn interaction with NodeBB API by watching how other plugins do it
• If the former is not enough: some reverse-engineering of NodeBB core for better insight and to know which modules you may want to require()
• For themes/widgets prefix any URL with /api to see which template-variables you have access to

---

Have fun and great that you want to participate

Hey guys,

it's been a while

I've created a plugin for email domain-name filter specification (whitelists, blacklists, both):

GitLab link | npm link

It's possible to specify just any patterns for domain-name matching, like shown within the examples.

It utilizes a matching module (ns-matcher) written by myself because I haven't found any matching modules for order-relevant tasks.

So if you find any bugs, please report them

Examples

Comments (shown with //) are not allowed within the actual syntax (yet).

Simple whitelist:

email.example.com  // Allow email.example.com
email.*.example.com  // Allow email.XYZ.example.com
**.email.abc.example.com  // Allow email.abc.example.com and all (deep) sub-domains
!email.abc.example.com  // Deny email.abc.example.com (sub-domains are still allowed)

Blacklists using negative patterns:

**  // Allow everything
!**.example.com  // Deny example.com and all (deep) sub-domains
email.example.com  // Allow email.example.com

---

I hope this will be useful, at least I needed it myself

Btw I know the plugin name might be misleading due to the possibility of blacklists/mixtures as well, but I did publish after a long coding session xD sorry.

Pings due to feature requested: @fasterthan @kalihman

Hey this is my first theme for NodeBB.

It's a simple dark theme for NodeBB based on Vanilla theme for NodeBB.

Installation

npm install nodebb-theme-dark-rectangles

Distribution

Github
NPM

Screenshots

Credits

variables.less, static and templates modified from Lavender Theme for NodeBB.

Have Fun!

Hey folks,

I've just released 1.0.0 of my completely reworked grunt setup for NodeBB module development.

See nodebb-grunt.

If you remember this one you'll be happy to hear that I'm not used to CoffeeScript anymore.
The rework allows you to simply define custom compilation steps and guides you on the way to a new plugin/module - currently only a basic plugin setup is shipped.

One important (to me) compilation step is the meta-replace. Means every occurrences of @{...} within certain files get replaced with the respective meta data (either from within package.json or .meta.json or from some pre-defined values, details are planned for the wiki).
So one might write "@{version}" within source code and it gets resolved to sth. like "0.1.0+12".
This is useful for preventing meta-data to be defined on multiple places. Everything only needs to be defined once.

In combination with the pre-defined meta @{env} which resolves to development or distribution, depending on which grunt task got run, this is a powerful feature. You can simply enable debugging for your development workflow without the need to care about disabling it anytime you want to publish.

It might still have a few glitches, but the main functionality is working so far.

I hope (with some more shipped module setups, etc.) it could help many fellows out there developing NodeBB modules.
And maybe I'll get it to be the standard environment for the NodeBB Community Projects
At least it's pretty helpful for myself developing modules (even so it didn't pay off the work I put into it yet ).

Some notes:

• The ./g bash script is undocumented within repository yet, see the source for usage information.
• I'd be happy to merge (I don't add others to the team yet, needs proof of code quality etc.) any PRs regarding module setups (e.g. themes) which should match the structure of the shipped plugin setup (e.g. use of @{...} where appropriate)
  • Some guides are going to get into the wiki soon, so wait for it...
• Since I just use JSHint, I'd be happy to accept PRs regarding rc files (within setups/**/*) of JSLint, ESLint, JSCS, Closure Linter (alias GJSLint) which should be equivalent to the restrictions within the .jshintrc files
• The restrictions within .jshintrc files (within setups/**/*) are open for discussion, so maybe wait a bit with the previous note.
• I plan to try out typescript some time and would definitely add setups for this when I do so
• I'd be happy to receive any kind of feedback

My workflow on nodebb-plugin-shortcuts for example has been minimized to

1. ./g sh d - starts grunt dev:sh and grunt within NodeBB root
2. do my work on the plugin, NodeBB refreshes automatically
3. ./g sh e - triggers defined publish tasks (see config/publish.json)

Simple bash script (needs jq to be installed besides common curl and of course npm

#!/bin/bash

type jq >/dev/null 2>&1 || { echo >&2 "I require \`jq\` but it's not installed.  Aborting."; exit 1; }

nbb_version=$(jq -r -e ".version" < package.json)

echo -e "NodeBB version \033[1m$nbb_version\033[0m"

i=0
packages=()

while [ "$1" ]; do
  package="nodebb-$1"
  version=$(curl -s https://packages.nodebb.org/api/v1/suggest\?package\="$package"\&version\="$nbb_version" | jq -r -e ".version")
  if [ "$version" == "null" ]; then
    echo -e "\033[31;1mNo suggested version of $package for NodeBB $nbb_version. Skipping.\033[0m"
  else
    packages[$i]="$package@$version"
    i=$(($i+1))
  fi
  shift
done

if [ ${#packages[@]} -ge 1 ]; then
  echo "> npm install ${packages[@]}"
  npm install ${packages[@]}
else
  echo "No package to be installed."
  exit 2
fi

syntax: my-script plugin-shortcuts theme-persona [...] (no nodebb- suffix, can be easily changed thought)
needs to be called from within your NodeBB-root

For images you could create your own convention:
For examle you could center all images with alt-tag beginning with _ by adding the following to custom css:

.img-responsive[alt^="_"] {
  margin: auto;
}

Now evey image included like ![_Mine](http://i.imgur.com/z9DWzht.gif) should be centered.

EDIT: For videos you may choose to center all of them, just add margin: auto; into the code I gave you here

1.0.0 finally it's getting serious... xD

I think there should be a complete custom page for /admin/user/xyz since the information about user activity and details should be available for the admin regardless of the theme.

In my opinion there are enough easy-to-follow guides for local installation, cloud installation or even docker-setup.

In your case you'll need the local installation guide for windows (I guess you're using windows because of your putty comment).

I agree that the windows-guide is a difficult one to follow since windows doesn't have anything to make your life more easy (like a well-working package-manager, etc.).
But your conclusion of missing guides on NodeBBs side is the wrong direction. You should expect of your OS to give you some hints on how to install software on it.

You simply cannot expect of a software to describe how to install it under all circumstances.
And windows is NOT the most-used OS for web-services. It's just (sadly) one of the most used OS in personal area and surely not optimized for development, network-connections or web-hosting.

Did you expect of your php-scripts to explain how to install them on any OS with any php-environment? Should any php-script come with an explanation how to install apache/lampp/xampp/whatever on any OS?

The only valid reason (from my point of view) for NodeBB itself to keep and manage those installation guides is because it's distributed as a git-repository and has a few dependencies that need to get installed additionally. And this is the most important part of the links above.
But you won't see any non-single-line description how to install those dependencies since it's not within NodeBBs responsibility (and capability since the installation-guide would need to keep up-to-date).

You don't need to run Windows for NodeBB (and I'd highly disadvise) but if you're using Windows you shouldn't expect of a software to describe its own installation as far as it's the default way of installing software.
If you want to use a cloud-service to run your NodeBB you shouldn't expect NodeBB to explain how to use that cloud-service or connect to it from any OS. It's a task of the cloud-service to give you a short introduction how to get a running connection. And even those shouldn't need to explain how to install putty on windows.

Hence that NodeBB delivers some guides on how to connect to a few well-known cloud-services is an overhead that doesn't need to be, it's an additional service of the NodeBB devs/community. But "Real need for better docs for noobs" should be out of question. You should assume that anyone who uses an OS should be "proficient with the system". If they're not they need to learn how to use their favorite search-engine or switch to another system that's more comfortable (and most likely doesn't cost anything ).

In my opinion NodeBB should even have less docs about installation since I don't want users without any clue what they're doing to setup an online service.
This privilege should be dedicated to those who have learned to understand what they're doing since it comes with a great responsibility and a bunch of work (that isn't any-near done after the setup) to run an online service.
To run an easy-to-setup platform like NodeBB doesn't take the responsibility of you to be aware of internet-policy, copyright laws or worst-case-scenarios.
So all in all my opinion contains that "noobs" shouldn't think about running a platform at all before getting familiar with the system and the platform.

But don't take this as an overall opinion of the NodeBB-community, it's my personal one and I expect a broad pool of (different) opinions about that to be present here

---

I should really learn how to write short answers and how to not make a discussion about windows vs linux within each post xD

To understand that exports syntax' you need to understand the node.js module structure a bit better:

Node.js (not NodeBB, it's just node.js) gives every module (every file that gets called somewhere using require(...), in this case from inside NodeBB core) a few (very few) global variables.
The relevant ones in this case are module and exports.

They in fact are the same from the beginning of module execution module.exports === exports.
But if you want to export something else than a plain object (such as exports) you can overwrite the exports attribute of module.

module.exports = "hello world";
// module.exports !== exports
// exports is now a meaningless object, not to be used anymore

What the two latter plugins do is to overwrite that module.exports attribute with another object (it's just the decision the dev made) instead of giving the pre-defined module.exports - that can also be referenced by exports - some new attributes.

Just consider a var exports = module.exports = {}; being executed before module-initialization. exports is a nice shortcut if you don't need to overwrite the container you want to export, but only it's attributes.

Documentation link: https://nodejs.org/api/globals.html

---

The other point regarding parameters for hooks can (mostly(?) at least since 0.8.0 I guess) be generalized to one parameter for action hooks and two parameters for filter or static hooks.

• action: function (data) { ... } - no callback since NodeBB doesn't wait for anything, actions are just to broadcast an event
• filter/static: function (data, callback) { ... } - callback to notify NodeBB back when you're done computing (by convention the callback needs to be called with callback(err, result) where one of both needs to equal null)

The data is most likely an object you can check the values either within NodeBB core code or by simply console.loging them once.

---

@AccessDenied said:

@frissdiegurke Thank you for you well written response. That clears up a lot on why I'm confused - there just simply ISN'T documentation on anything. If I could ask, how did someone like yourself become familiar with the concepts behind NodeBB? Are they just intuitive or are they related to other forum/CMS style frameworks?

I've been into node.js (self-trained with help of brother) in first place - plain browser-side javascript mainly via userscripts and hobby pages even beforehand - and discovered NodeBB later on.
If you have some experience with any node.js application and know a few different conventions/styles (e.g. callback vs promise-based coding) you kind-of understand all node.js applications (as long they're not too bad written).
And since NodeBB is quite well-written from my point of view it isn't hard to get into it when you know the underlying language.
I've followed NodeBB since early days (not the very beginning, but 0.3.x or so), so I've become familiar with their code-base and never had problems with reverse-engineering any feature I needed to know more about. Of cause I did ask the community a few times, mostly when I thought to have an idea of improvement or I felt like sth. was missing.

You're not a burden, I'm happy to help (besides some other reasons like improving my english knowledge). Otherwise I'd not be active within this community and would just keep writing my plugins within a dark room . If I'd even bother to write the plugins then (since I mostly write them for this very same community...).

A plugin that adds client-side live-reload ability.

It's powerful in combination with NodeBB Grunt Development

Installation

npm install nodebb-plugin-livereload

More on github

@psychobunny

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
—Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule)

Hey guys,

I've just published the first (except emoji-extended xD ) releases of

• nodebb-plugin-emoji-extended (GitHub)
• nodebb-plugin-emoji-one (GitHub)
• nodebb-plugin-emoji-cubicopp (GitHub)
• nodebb-plugin-emoji-static (GitHub)
• nodebb-plugin-emoji-apple (GitHub)

All of those depend on nodebb-plugin-emoji-extended@^1.0.0 being installed.
Take a look at the ACP settings of nodebb-plugin-emoji-extended to see and feel all improvements

The (un)install buttons are currently not working and thus disabled.

Feedback is always welcome.
Here is my current TODO list:

Emoji Static
 * [s/c] show alert with reason of error when index not found
 * [s/c] image upload
 * [s/c] ACP details-handling (deprecate *index.json*)
 * [c] multiple sets management

Emoji Extended
 * [s/c] enable within signatures (including auto-completion)
 * [s] allow sets to specify outdated files (e.g. index-file check), indicate within ACP
 * [s/c] allow user to specify prefix/suffix for auto-completion per set, auto-create suffix (setId) for overwritten emoji
 * [c] check markdown-alternatives for code-block detection implementation
 * [s/c] allow alternate image source for modal (e.g. sprites image)
 * [s/c] ACP page
   * [c] add sort capability of active sets
   * [s/c] indicate busy-state on page-load
   * [s/c] implement [un]install actions
   * [s/c] show modules that are installed but not enabled within NodeBB (on top of available sets)
     * [s/c] implement activation action
   * [s] filter modules for installation that ain't compatible with NodeBB version
 * [c] (maybe) markdown check rework
 * [s/c] (maybe) push-update styles on sets-update, append to already in-use styles

Emoji One
 * [s] parse unicode emoji characters

New Sets
 * twemoji
 * PhantomOpenEmoji
 * emojisymbols.com

Of course if you want to contribute, feel encouraged to send a PR or even publish your own sets

I think it's pretty straight forward:

/src   The javascript sources server-side
/public   Anything client-side
/public/templates    Basic HTML templates, most get overwritten within themes thought
/public/vendor    3rd party libraries in use at client-side
/public/src    The javascript sources client-side
/public/src/modules    Module sources of the client-side, some get used server-side too (especially the translator)

Worth mentioning are /public/nodebb.min.js and /public/acp.min.js, those get generated and are no place to change anything

Hey ToM

As far I know it's only possible to get information of the board via API (prepend api/ to any URL like https://community.nodebb.org/api/topic/1280/api), not to set like you want to (if I understood you correctly).

I think better than creating a tool that writes into the db directly would be writing a plugin for NodeBB to do so. In this case you should be able to require the NodeBB-core services to create new posts and whatever you want.
Some pros for writing a plugin would be:

• DB-independent (maybe you want to switch over to redis some time)
• javascript instead of DB-dependent query language
• you could publish the plugin therefor other users get the comfort out of it

greetings
FDG

Completely forgot to publish it here ^^

It's a fork of the well-known emoji-plugin that adds some mappings like ;) to :wink: etc.
Runs with less priority than emoji-skype-plugin.

Also it excludes the code-blocks, which isn't implemented in current version of emoji.

Here you go

Deprecated Installation (you should rather install via NodeBB Admin-CP):

npm install nodebb-plugin-emoji-extended

Note: This is a standalone plugin, having it enabled besides nodebb-plugin-emoji will cause parsing-conflicts!

So you just have to pass a spoon of caviar next lunch

@planner I think what you're talking about is the max-height of .home .category-item .post-preview p that's set within the theme (even the insertion of the replies is a theme-dependent script). The whole replies are within the category-box but eg. lavender crops each reply at 200px height. You'll need to change this within custom style like

.home .category-item .post-preview p { max-height: 500px; }

or none to show the full replies.

Since many plugin devs may not have noticed the new utility I recently added (PR) to the core that may be helpful to plugin devs, here a short brief:

I've added a new Settings-Framework that provides the possibility to save whole objects within the database (gets stringified behind the scene).
The object-structure gets updated whenever it and the version (provided within server-side constructor) change without any work on your side.
Related to the server-side settings-module you can refer to the single (nested) object-attributes within client-side ACP templates.
The new client-side settings-methods are settings.sync and settings.persist rather than the old settings.load and settings.save (left there for backwards compatibility).
Build-in support for many input-types, arrays, selects, textareas, keyboard-keys but easy to expand with your own object-/input-types.

If you come across an common used field-type you may create a new PR to get it into core
(e.g. radio-button support is missing I just realize)

For a whole (at least more complete than above) overview about what I'm talking see the docs

As always you have the choice (except you're using windows ) to put your complaints below or at /dev/null

Updated (completely reworked, plain JS now) to NodeBB 0.9.0 and current lavender and persona themes.

Also transferred to https://github.com/NodeBB-Community/nodebb-plugin-shortcuts