Vanilla is an open-source, pluggable, themable, multi-lingual community-building solution. It’s especially made to help small communities grow larger through SEO mojo, totally customizable social tools, and great user experience. It’s designed to be both simple to install and maintain, as well as offering some powerful functionality.
Vanilla is also built with integration at the forefront, so it can seamlessly integrate with your existing website, blog, or custom-built application.
Vanilla was born out of the desire to create customizable, and downright entertaining community solutions. Vanilla has been used to power over 400,000 community forums around the world.
Vanilla OSS has a very lightweight core with a number of optional plugins, including chat, private messages, “Who’s Online”, and attachments.
The latest version requires PHP 7.0 or higher.
Key Features
- Dashboard, provides access to the control features of your Vanilla Forum.
- Easily set up and maintain a full-featured discussion forum with unlimited categories
- Blog comments.
- Website widgets.
- Social links.
- Themes.
- Ranks.
- Category Following.
- Badges which reward users for reaching certain milestones.
- Plugins:
- Custom Theme.
- Embed Vanilla.
- File Upload.
- Feed Discussions.
- Getting Started:
- jsConnect.
- Single Sign On – lets users sign on to a third-party system (like a Vanilla Forum) without needing a separate username and password.
- SAML (cloud only).
- OAuth 2.
- jsConnect.
- Facebook Connect.
- Twitter Connect.
- Google Connect & OpenID.
- Vanilla Statistics.
- OAuth2 integrations with these third-party services as ready-to-go addons:
- Facebook.
- Twitter.
- LinkedIn.
- Google+.
- Search Engine Optimizations.
- Native API (APIv2).
- Full IPv6 support.
- Embeddable forums.
- Analytics allows forum administrators to review vital activity on their forums over a specific time period.
- Import content from other forums – includes passwords, images, emoticons, uploaded files, private messages, banned users, and more.
- Permissions – uses permissions to restrict access to particular content, options, or workflows.
Website: open.vanillaforums.com
Support: Documentation, GitHub code repository
Developer: Vanilla Forums Inc.
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Vanilla is built on an MVC framework named Garden. Its purpose is to provide an extensible, pluggable platform on which to build all the addons.
Vanilla is written in PHP, TypeScript and JavaScript. Learn PHP with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn TypeScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn JavaScript with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Internet Forum Software | |
|---|---|
| Discourse | Discussion forum, mailing list, and long-form chat room |
| NodeBB | Community platform for the modern web |
| Flarum | Simple discussion platform for your website |
| Forem | Platform for building modern, independent, and safe communities |
| phpBB | Flat-forum bulletin board software solution |
| bbPress | Forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress |
| MyBB | Intuitive, extensible forum software |
| miniBB | Easy, lite, and speedy quick forum |
| Vanilla | Simple and flexible forum software |
| Thredded | Simple and feature rich Rails forum engine |
| Simple Machines Forum | Elegant, effective, powerful forum software |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |