vanillasite.at :: howto-vanilla-vista

This document assumes you're using Vanilla 0.6. This release comes with almost everything you'll need to integrate VanillaVista into your very own VanillaSpace.

First, some preliminaries: Make sure that resource-dir and resource-url in your Vanilla configuration file (vanilla.cgi.conf) are correctly set. resource-url must be the URL via which files in the directory resource-dir are web-accessible. Usually resource-dir is a subdirectory of the DocumentRoot of your web server (or vhost).

Set vanilla-base-url in your Vanilla configuration file (e.g. http://your-host-name/cgi-bin/, or in a strictly local configuration http://localhost/cgi-bin/). The VanillaVista applet needs absolute URLs to correctly retrieve node information.

Download VanillaVista-4.jar and place it in <resource-dir>/vista/. This directory already contains a file named vista.js. Check whether everything's alright so far by entering <resource-url>vista/VanillaVista-4.jar (e.g. http://localhost/res/vista/VanillaVista-4.jar) into the address field of your browser. You definitely shouldn't get a 404. If you do, check whether resource-dir and resource-url really point to the same location.

Edit the main template (vanilla-template). In the <head> section, insert <script src="{resource-url}vista/vista.js">, and in a section of your choosing, insert a link that pops up a VanillaVista window:
<a href="javascript:vista('{vanilla-get-url}?selector=display-asis&snip=vanilla-vista-applet&vista-for-snip={.url-name}',800,400);">vista</a>

That's it! If you need further assistance, direct your questions to the Vanilla mailing list.