The Subcommunities feature is one method of dividing your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community into multiple "mini communities" (often by language or product). For more information about subcommunities, check out the article below.
In this article, you'll learn how to set up the Subcommunities for your Vanilla community.
Create Categories
Subcommunities are built on top of Categories, and require a specific Category structure to work.
📝 NOTE: If you're unfamiliar with Categories, check out this article.
1. Access the Dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings > Forum > Categories.
3. Create top-level (should have no subcategories), Nested type Categories for each Subcommunity you would like to have.
- With few exceptions, every other Category should be inside one of these Nested Categories.
- Each Subcommunity must have at least one subcategory (child Category).
- Categories found outside of these categories will likely not be accessible to your users.
- With Subcommunities and a default subcommunity set, there will be no way for users to reach top-level categories outside of their current Subcommunity with navigation.
- See our instructions for navigating between subcommunities.
- Exceptions to this rule are the
Social Groups Category created by the Groups addon as well as the Reported Posts Category from the Reported Posts addon. - Groups and Reported posts are shared between subcommunities, and are accessible from all subcommunities.
Create Subcommunities
1. Access the Dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings > Forum > Subcommunities.
✔️ TIP: Alternatively, append the following to your community URL: /subcommunities.
3. Click Add Subcommunity.
4. Fill out the fields as appropriate for the Subcommunity you're creating:
- Name - The name of the Subcommunity. This will appear in the SubcommunityToggleModule.
- Description - Describe the purpose of the Subcommunity.
- Folder - The bit added to the URL to differentiate the Subcommunities from each other.
- Themes - Select which Theme to apply to the Subcommunity.
- Category - Select one of the Nested Categories that you created earlier.
- Locale - Select the language to use for the Subcommunity. Subcommunities are often used to separate a community into different sections based on language, but different languages are not a requirement for subcommunities. (See main article on locales).
- Icon URL - If you want to upload an icon image to represent the Subcommunity, you can do so here.
- Banner Image - If you want to upload a banner image to represent the Subcommunity, you can do so here.
- Homepage - Select which page should be the homepage for the Subcommunity. You can choose the Discussions page, Categories page, or the Knowledge Base page.
- Default - You can check the Default box if you'd like this Subcommunity to be the default Subcommunity. There can only be one default Subcommunity at a time. See considerations when setting a default subcommunity.
5. Click Save to create the Subcommunity. If you set a default, you may notice your URL in the Dashboard adjusting to reflect this change.
Subcommunity List
After creating your Subcommunities in the previous step, verify that your Subcommunities align with your top-level Categories. The image below depicts a proper Subcommunity setup.
