The Subcommunities feature is one method of dividing your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community into multiple "mini communities" (often by language or product). Subcommunities are a great way to manage a community in multiple languages on the same instance.
A subcommunity divides a single community or a node into different areas by making each of the top-level categories into a separate area of the community.
Availability
The Subcommunities addon is available with the Enterprise package only.
📝 NOTE: If you are a Cloud customer on a plan that includes subcommunities and are unable to access them, contact Vanilla support to have them enable it for you.
Separated content
Categories and their content are filtered between subcommunities.
- Discussions and all of their types
- Normal
- Question
- Poll
- Idea
- Comments
- Articles
This filtering occurs on the following pages.
- Recent Discussions
/discussions - All Categories
/categories - Home page pointing to either All Categories or Recent Discussions
- Knowledge Base Homepage
/kb - Related Articles
/kb/articles/425 below the article - Creating a new article
/kb/articles/add
Shared content
Some community content is shared between a community's subcommunities. For example:
- Users and user-related features
- Profiles
- Drafts
- Private Messages / Conversations
- Notifications
- Points / Reputation
- Badges
- Leaderboards
- Roles / Ranks / Role Tracker
- Moderation features (such as Moderation & Spam Queues)
- Reported posts
- Tags (also called #hashtags)
- Warnings & Notes
- The Activity page
- The BestOf page
- Groups
- Analytics
- Who's Online
If your community requires some of these features to split between sections of your sites, but still needs certain configurations and users synchronized between them, a setup using a Hub, Multisite Sync, and a Single Sign On solution may be required.
Set a default subcommunity
A subcommunity can be set as default by checking the Default checkbox while creating and editing a subcommunity. Setting a default subcommunity adds a rewrite rule to rewrite every single page of the site to be in the default subcommunity if one is not provided through a prefix in the URL.
For example, if the default subcommunity is set as English with the URL prefix of en set, the following URLs would be re-written:
/ => /en/categories => /en/categories/profile => /en/profile/discussions => /en/discussions/groups => /en/groups/dashboard => /en/dashboard... and many more
What if I turn off subcommunities later?
These are 301 redirects, which means they are permanent redirects. This means user’s browsers (and your own) will keep the redirect cached. If you later decide to unset your default subcommunity (without setting a new one) or disable subcommunities, many users’ browser will still attempt to redirect.
Properly undoing these redirects may require assistance.
Communities with no default subcommunity
If no default subcommunity is set, users visiting forums.example.com would see a category list as if the Subcommunities addon was not enabled. If the user then clicked a top level Category associated with a subcommunity, they will be navigated to the Categories page of that subcommunity.
While this may sound like a good way of navigating between subcommunities, it doesn’t work in practice. This is because Vanilla rewrites the breadcrumbs for users inside of a subcommunity in a way that makes it feel quite disorienting to navigate from a non-subcommunity portion of a site to a subcommunity portion of it.
Navigate between subcommunities
When a default subcommunity is set, it can be difficult for a user to navigate between subcommunities. To properly facilitate this, the SubcommunityToggleModule is included with the Subcommunities addon.
This module allows a user to switch between communities using a dropdown menu, like the one shown below. Pictured below is an enhanced SubcommunityToggleModule next to the MeBox. Other common locations for this Module are in the Panel and Footer of the site.
Subcommunities & Products
Subcommunities can be grouped by products.
A product is a way of grouping related subcommunities. This can enable Rich translation integrations in some parts of Vanilla. The first integration to use this is multilingual articles in Knowledge Base.
📝 NOTE: The products you create are available for certain filters in API calls and analytics charts; they're referred to as Site Section IDs.
To enable this feature, toggle ON the Enable Product Integration option on the subcommunities page.
Theming Subcommunities
If you use subcommunities and you want to learn how to give each subcommunity its own theme, see:
Legacy Themes only
To add the module using CustomizeTheme, use the following snippet.
{module name="SubcommunityToggleModule"}
Additional resources
Click the link below to access a video expanding on what you learned in this article.
