Mike

[mike]

Hmm yeah, there are a lot of plugins for that and anything could be enabled i think. Anyway - i'm thinking isn't this talk about free version limitation just a marketing trash talk ? The 'main' site of this project is http://vanillaforums.org/ and you can see that there are really A LOT of addons available.

According to text editor - my main pros is that it uses markdown instead of bbcode. I'm sure that phpbb can also use markdown but installing it is probably a horrible thing, just like installing anything in phpbb

 

[Cervator]

Yeah, it could be push for "Hey just come use the paid version instead!", although it still looks firmly like they're in the camp of "here's a taste, you can mod it if you like, but we have a shiny premium version over here!" rather than the more typical open source approach where support is optional and just a bunch of smart people who'll be able to set you up on the platform really well

I didn't see a lot of native plugins, but there were some of the basics (social integration, smileys, etc). I forgot about markdown, that's still cool. Although, where is it really? I only see the http://vanillaforums.org/addon/521-markdown on the community site, and that looks somewhat outdated?

Activity is also a bit of an indicator of health. Vanilla's entire community forum is about 15k posts. phpBB is ... 3,719,235

I don't doubt that they have their advantages. And everybody was small once. I remain somewhat skeptical though. I don't have install / plugin experience for either, so can't really comment there.

Any other interesting forum candidates out there?

 

[mike]

Although, where is it really? I only see the http://vanillaforums.org/addon/521-markdown on the community site, and that looks somewhat outdated?

Markdown is a built in feature

I don't doubt that they have their advantages. And everybody was small once. I remain somewhat skeptical though. I don't have install / plugin experience for either, so can't really comment there.

Well, in vanilla installing plugin is just like in wordpress, you're uploading few files to 'plugins' directory and turnin plugin ON in admin panel. In phpBB there is no such thing like plugin. If you wan't to install any modification, you need to edit core files of phpbb, sometimes, when mod is more complex, it can take even few hours. It also means that when you want to upgrade your forum to newer version, you need to overwrite all mods you've installed before and install them again. phpbb exists since ~2000 and i have no idea why they still don't have a real plugin system

Any other interesting forum candidates out there?

There are scripts like http://www.simplemachines.org/ ('size' just like phpbb and also no plugin system), http://punbb.informer.com/ (extremely simple, no possibility to modify theme [just CSS], plugin system. I can say i even like it a bit hehe), http://mybb.com (plugin system, really bad way to modify theme [through the textarea in admin panel]) but they don't have a start to vanilla i think

Here is how i see it:
vanilla > punbb > myBB > SMF > phpBB

So punBB would be my next recommendation after vanilla. Here are some example forums based on this one: http://punbb.informer.com/forums/
http://get-simple.info/forum/
http://railsforum.com/index.php

 

[Cervator]

I like the look of that rails forum. Maybe the vanilla example is just too... dare I say, vanilla, for my geeky taste?

I guess with some style/theme tweaks and a few plugins it might be just as good or better than phpBB. I'm still not discounting it, and don't want to be the only voice on the topic either. I don't doubt phpBB might be a beast with the plugins, Foswiki itself can be sort of tricky too.

One thing I didn't look at/for was themes/styles in Vanilla. Maybe there are some that look a bit more like our current phpBB?