I’m setting up a forum for a side project of mine, and wanted to check out some of the new alternatives that have come into existence since the last time I dabbled in forums (maybe 2004?). The best new entrant that I could find is called Vanilla Forum (http://vanillaforums.org/). Its an awesome tool for the right application, but I ended up going with the tried and true Simple Machines Forum anyway. Here’s why…
- Installing it was a snap (just upload everything, browse to the upload folder, follow instructions).
- After install you end up in the admin dashboard. I fell in love with the simplicity instantly. Everything is clean and minimalistic, and I imagine would be extremely low overhead to maintain.
- Organization is by Categories only. Vanilla makes category set up dead easy – designate parent categories, child categories, and drag-and-drop to organize them as you will.
Simplicity is the achilles heel, though. Without a forum/sub-forum structure, I was going to end up with probably 100+ categories – at which point, they’d become overload for any visitors. Without some kind of drill-down/hierarchial organization, Vanilla couldn’t cut it for me.
So if you’ve got a really targetted forum that would benefit from the conceptual simplicity of a relatively flat structure, check out Vanilla. In my case, I needed a bit more of the bells and whistles, so SMF it is.
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We have new features coming in our next release that will help solve this.
Brendan, what’s the timing like on the new release?
Rod, glad you asked, next week!
Right on – I’m looking forward to seeing it. I love how streamlined everything is in VF – its a pleasure to setup and use, compared to the 7000 options scattered across 8 control panels of something like SMF or PHPbb.
I like design and use of javascript to remove postback in Vanilla, Also it is simple and user friendly.