vanilla is a light weight Internet forum

Internet forum

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are at least temporarily archived...

 package written in the PHP

PHP

PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

 scripting language

Scripting language

A scripting language, script language, or extension language is a programming language that allows control of one or more applications. "Scripts" are distinct from the core code of the application, as they are usually written in a different language and are often created or at least modified by the...

. It is released under the GNU Licence. Vanilla Forums are open-source, standards-compliant, customizable discussion forums.

Features

Vanilla is an open-source, pluggable, themable, multi-lingual community-building solution

Solution

In chemistry, a solution is a homogeneous mixture composed of only one phase. In such a mixture, a solute is dissolved in another substance, known as a solvent. The solvent does the dissolving.- Types of solutions :...

.

• Users can easily setup up and maintain a full-featured discussion forum.
• Forum hosting is free with advertising, which can be removed for a fee.
• Forum is hosted at a subdomain of Vanillaforums.com – custom subdomains are available for a fee.
• A variety of themes can be applied to the forum.
• User can define categories for the forum and registration type for users.
• There are many addons that can be added to the core to extend the functionality

Vanilla 1

The Core of Vanilla is very light-weight, but there are many plugins available. There are Extensions for Chat, Private Messages, "Who's Online", Attachments and many more.

Vanilla 1 is still being actively developed alongside Vanilla 2.

The latest version is 1.2.2 which was released on November 8th, 2011.

The next planned release will be 1.3.0 which will coincide with the launch of a new website. It is expected to be released in either December 2011 or January 2012.

Vanilla 2

Vanilla 2 is a complete rewrite of vanilla grounded on the framework Garden (like "what's growing in your Garden"). It's object oriented, modular, extentional and modern.

It's claimed to be easy to switch to Vanilla 2 because there are import scripts for most of the popular forum systems

New core features since vanilla 2

• Vanilla (embed your Forum anywhere via JavaScript)
• Vanilla API
• Social Connect
• Vanilla Mobile
• Vanilla Connect (Single Sign In)
• Themes
• Banner
• File Upload
• Import Tool (e. g. phpBB, vBulletin)

Garden is the framework on which Vanilla 2 is built. Its focus is building community scripts. A forum (what Vanilla2 is) is only one possible way to use Garden.

Hosted Forums

The hosted version of Vanilla runs on the newest version of vanilla and has all features of the next open source release.

See also

• Comparison of Internet forum software
  Comparison of Internet forum software
  This article outlines the general features commonly found in various Internet forum software packages.-Subarticles:This article is a comparison of some of the major features of the various Internet forum software packages currently available. This page highlights major features that the manager of...
  
  
• Comparison of Internet forum software (PHP)
  Comparison of Internet forum software (PHP)
  This is a comparison of the features of various Internet forum packages written in PHP.- General information :Basic general information about the forums: creator/company, license/price etc.- Features :- Data storage :...
  
  

External links

• Vanilla (forum) Documentation