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.

  • Role-based permissions are respected in Higher Logic Vanilla. It means that users can see the content that has been assigned to their roles. For the Groups object, content searchability works on Public, Private, and Secret-based permissions.

  • Permissions on indexed data are updated every 15 minutes.

Establish a Connection

  1. Navigate to Content Sources and click Add New Content Sources.

  1. Find Higher Logic Vanilla and click Add.

  2. 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

  3. 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 manual and is performed after configuring the content source. In Choose A Date, select a date to start crawling; The data created after the selected date will be crawled. For Frequency, keep it to the default value Never. At last, click Set.

Select Content Types and Fields for Indexing

Currently, two space types–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.

    NOTE. 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.

You have successfully added Higher Logic Vanilla as a content source in SearchUnify. Perform a manual crawl to start indexing data in SearchUnify.

Related

Difference between Manual and Frequency Crawls

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.

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.

The frequency crawl currently runs as manual crawl for Higher Logic Vanillla as the whole data 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 and thus, updating the crawled data. This helps end users find the latest content and not the archived content. Also, the webhook helps update Group-level permissions.

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

For Delivery URL, contact your CSM. It's a unique URL that will be provided by the SearchUnify tea. And select all Events from Which events should trigger this webhook? section.