I guess the code of Vanilla was ported from PHP4, right? This would explain why public fields were excessively used and objects are still passed by reference. Or perhaps the documentation refers to the new version of Vanilla, but that is pretty unreasonable since it's still under active development.
In both cases there's a clear contradiction between code and documentation, it would be nice to state explicitly to which exact version of Vanilla the documentation refers to. Good examples are the Doctrine and Zend Framework documentation which display a link (Doctrine) or a dropdown (ZF) to select the documentation version.
Okay, but the fact that the version offered for dowload is 1.1.10 and the documentation is about the _beta_ version 2.0 is really misleading. Don't you think so?
Uh, there is documentation for both and both are available for download. Although Vanilla 1 documentation should probably at least be linked to at the top of the documentation tab here.