Use Higher Logic Vanilla as a Content Source

Higher Logic Vanilla (formerly Vanilla Forums) is a popular cloud-based online community platform. If your online community is hosted on Higher Logic Vanilla, SearchUnify provides a connector for using it as a content source.

Permissions

• While adding Higher Logic Vanilla in SearchUnify, make sure you have admin privileges in Higher Logic. Only admins can generate a Personal Access Token, which is required for authentication in SearchUnify.

• Higher Logic Vanilla respects role-based permissions, restricting users to content assigned to their roles. Groups objects allow content search based on Public, Private, and Secret permissions.

Establish a Connection

1. Navigate to Content Sources.

   

2. Click Add New Content Source.

   

3. Find Higher Logic Vanilla and click Add.

   

4. Enter the following details for authentication:

   Name. Give your content source a name.

   Client URL. Enter the URL of your community instance.

   Language. Select the community language.

   Username. Enter either your email address or your community username.

   Personal Access Token. Enter the personal access token of your Higher Logic Vanilla community.

   

   Refer to the following doc for instructions on how to generate a personal access token: Generate an Access Token in Higher Logic Vanilla

5. Click Connect after you have entered all the required details,

Once the connection has been set up successfully, you will be prompted to the next action - Set Frequency.

Set Up Crawl Frequency

The first crawl is always conducted manually and takes place following the configuration of the content source. To ensure the first crawl functions correctly, select an appropriate date in the Choose a Date option. This process will index only the data that has been updated or created after this specified date. In the Frequency field, select "Never." Then, click Set and proceed to the next section

Select Content Types and Fields for Indexing

Currently, two objects–Category and Knowledge Base–are supported out of the box. Each object has several fields, which you can add and remove the existing fields that come pre-configured.

1. Under the Rules tab, By Content Type is the selected subtab.

2. You can see the discussions, articles, events, and groups are already added. Click on the edit button from the Actions column to view and edit the pre-configured fields.

   

   Although, it is not recommended for users other than Admins to make any changes in the fields.

3. Switch to By Categories subtab. Use the alphabetical index to find Categories and Knowledge Base. Those alphabets are highlighted in blue which have a category under it.

   For example, Community (Knowledge Base) is shown under alphabet C.

   

4. Use the checkbox to select the categories for indexing. Click Save once done.

After the First Crawl

Return to the Content Sources screen and click in Actions. The number of indexed documents is updated after the crawl is complete. You can view crawl progress in in Actions. Documentation on crawl progress is in View Crawl Logs.

NOTE 1

Review the settings in Rules if there is no progress in Crawl Logs.

NOTE 2

For Mamba '22 and newer instances, search isn't impacted during a crawl. However, in older instances, some documents remain inaccessible while a crawl is going on.

Once the first crawl is complete, click in Actions open the content source for editing, and set a crawl frequency.

1. In Choose a Date, click to fire up a calendar and select a date. Only the data after the selected date is indexed.

   

2. Use the Frequency dropdown to select how often SearchUnify should index the data. For illustration, the frequency has been set to Weekly and Tuesday has been chosen as the crawling day. Whenever the Frequency is other than Never, a third dropdown appears where you can specify the interval. Also, whenever Frequency is set to Hourly, then manual crawls are disabled.

   

3. Click Set to save crawl frequency settings. On clicking Set, you are taken to the Rules tab.

   

Although you can set up frequency crawling, the feature doesn't function. The bug will be fix in the upcoming releases.

During a frequency crawl all the data in your Higher Logic Vanilla is re-crawled from scratch.

NOTE.

The Frequency should be set to 30 minutes or higher to avoid frequency crawl failures.

Higher Logic Vanilla Webhook

Webhooks help SearchUnify receive update APIs from Higher Logic Vanilla, keeping the crawled data fresh for end-users to find the latest content, not archived versions.

The steps to creating a webhook in Higher Logic Vanilla are detailed in this document: Add Webhook in Higher Logic Vanilla.

For the Delivery URL, ask your CSM for the unique URL provided by the SearchUnify team. And select all events from the "Which events should trigger this webhook?" section.