Attention: this documentation is a work in progress!

Welcome to Vanilla & Garden

Vanilla is built on Garden, our new php development platform that comes loaded with the functionality you need to get your applications off the ground quickly and easily. As soon as you put Garden on your server, you can immediately sign in, manage users, roles, applications, plugins, and all of the settings you need in any web app. Our goal with Garden was to allow you, the developer, to skip past all of the boring stuff you need to program with every user-driven web app you write, and get to the fun stuff: your idea.

With Garden, you'll be creating applications, and plugins for those applications. An application can be thought of as a grouping of functionality and pages, for example: Vanilla (our web discussion forum) is an application. Other applications could be things like: a wiki, a cms, etc. Just like Vanilla, the idea is that you create an application with very few features. Then, you let the community take your application and run with it by creating plugins for it. Vanilla, for example, is a dead simple discussion forum, but there are over 400 plugins for it that allow it to do far more than we ever imagined.

With Garden, we give you the ability to create simple, pluggable applications that can be extended to suit any custom need. What's growing in your Garden?

Who should use Garden?

Garden is written so that anyone can quickly and easily put together whatever application or feature they can dream of. Some of the most awesome plugins are no longer than 8 lines of code, so you don't need to be a computer science major to use it. That being said, we haven't put any limitations on what you can do with it. So, if you are a computer science major, you won't feel restricted in any way.