NodeBB looks great for what it does: single-community forums. I'm wondering, however, whether it could be modified to support multiple communities without necessarily having separate instances of the software.

I was thinking you could treat categories as communities, but it doesn't look like NodeBB has a way for a user to "subscribe" to them such that their "front page" would simply be a list of populate posts for all of their subscribed categories.

Another worry would be scalability. It would seem like using a relational database would be better for tracking/parsing a lof of the data that a website of 100's of communities would need. (I'm NOT a DB expert by any means...just a hunch on my part).

Just wondering whether something like this should even be attempted or would simply creating this multi-community forum from scratch be a better approach.

Does anyone have any tips on setting up a proper plugin development environment? All the links I've found are at least 2 years old and I'm wondering if there is a "better" way of doing things.

@pitaj Thanks, your advice coupled with this post helped me get the syntax right:

https://community.nodebb.org/topic/3554/how-to-create-and-use-a-template-helper/9

NodeBB looks great for what it does: single-community forums. I'm wondering, however, whether it could be modified to support multiple communities without necessarily having separate instances of the software.

I was thinking you could treat categories as communities, but it doesn't look like NodeBB has a way for a user to "subscribe" to them such that their "front page" would simply be a list of populate posts for all of their subscribed categories.

Another worry would be scalability. It would seem like using a relational database would be better for tracking/parsing a lof of the data that a website of 100's of communities would need. (I'm NOT a DB expert by any means...just a hunch on my part).

Just wondering whether something like this should even be attempted or would simply creating this multi-community forum from scratch be a better approach.

@julian Yes, I am using heroku actually.

I guess that answers my question

I already have the theme applied. In order for the skin to work, though, it looks like you need to select the skin for the theme under:

Plugins -> Slick Theme

Strange that there is multiple places for skin selecting...

Okay, it doesn't look like selecting any of the skins does anything.

I'm trying to use nodebb-theme-slick. Can you please explain how to set this up for the dark skin option?

Could you tell me how to activate these skins?

EDIT: Nevermind, found it.

Appearance -> Skins

I'd like to have multiple config.json files (1 for development, 1 for production) and manually copying them back and forth is a real pain, especially when I accidentally check the development one in.

Is there a way I could specify which one to use on startup?

@pitaj Thanks, your advice coupled with this post helped me get the syntax right:

https://community.nodebb.org/topic/3554/how-to-create-and-use-a-template-helper/9

I'm trying to print out a specific custom variable value of mine in the account stats row. Specifically "customFields" is an array that contains a name/value pairs of custom fields.

I'd like to print out the customField with the name "karma" (if it exists). Is it possible for the templating system's conditionals to handle that? Something like:

<!-- BEGIN customFields -->
<!-- IF customFields.name == 'karma' -->
    <div class="stat">
    <div class="human-readable-number" title="{customFields.value}">{customFields.value}</div>
    <span class="stat-label">{customFields.name}</span>
</div>
<!-- ENDIF -->
<!-- END customFields -->

@julian There didn't appear to be a way of managing this number plus I assumed there are already lots of things node already does to modify this number.

I wanted completely control of it, including the ability to "spend" it on things down the road.

@pitaj Wow, thanks for the exhaustive instructions.

Do you really have to rebuild after every change though? In my limited experience developing Node apps, I'm usually been able to use vagrant + synced folders so that I could make a change on my desktop, sync it over to my vagrant box automatically, and the change taking effect immediately.

Is that kind of workflow not possible with nodeBB?