Vanilla
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
Vanilla is a bulletin board system/forum. Call it what you want, but vanilla is what it says, vanilla. I like it coz it’s really simple and unique. Here’s what’s different ’bout Vanilla:
Discussions and Categories
In Vanilla, threads are known as discussions. Instead of having a hierarchy of boards, it keeps thing simple by grouping discussions into categories. It’s got 3 tabs as navigation: discussions, categories and search. It’s great for simple forums, but doesn’t work out for larger forums like lowyat.net forums. Discussions could optionally be tagged too, but moderators would have a tough time tagging each discussion properly.
Whispers
No, I’m not referring to pads. Whispers is Vanilla’s take on personal messages (PM). Instead of having an email like inbox of your PMs, you whisper your message to someone in a discussion itself. Your whisper will appear in the discussion, only to your target user. A potential use of it is to keep to require users to keep their one-line comments into whispers.
Add-ons
Many of Vanilla’s additional features come from extensions. It’s sort of great since you could pick only the extensions you need, keeping you forum nice and clean.
Go take a tour of Vanilla here, or jump straight to it’s community forums to get a feel of Vanilla.
Tags: vanilla
