Vanilla started way back in the web 1.0 days as a private forum for graphic designers and programmers called "o8". We made Vanilla because we wanted something simpler than the existing forum solutions of the time. As the community grew, we added custom features to the forum to suit the specific needs of that community. Eventually we realized that hard-coding these features to the core was painful and slow-going, so the Vanilla plugin framework was born. Eventually we shut down "o8", but the users kept coming back to us looking for copies of the software, so in 2005 we released Vanilla as an open source project.
Over the years Vanilla has been adopted by hundreds of thousands of sites, including big names like O'Reilly Media, Rackspace, Mozilla, and many more.
In 2008, we once again took a look at the state of forums, and realized that there was still much work to be done. With Vanilla 2 we've taken a focus on improving our plugin framework, improving theming, and most of all improving integration with your existing applications.
VanillaForums.com is our hosting service where you can start a community in under 60 seconds.
VanillaForums.org is our open-source site, where developers, fans, and users can download and use the open-source software for free, as well as upload and share their plugins & themes, and get involved by helping each other out on the community forums.
Vanilla 1 was originally released in 2005 and requires PHP 4 and MySQL 4. It has had many minor revisions that mostly included bug and security patches. There is a Google Code repo of the Vanilla 1 codebase where the community developers work together to handle any issues that arise. At the time of this writing, the core Vanilla developers are no longer working on the Vanilla 1 code-base.
Vanilla 2 has been in development since mid-2008, and is a complete rewrite from the ground up. Vanilla 2 requires PHP 5.2 and MySQL 4. There is a GitHub repo of the Vanilla 2 codebase named "Garden" after the framework we've created to build Vanilla 2. At the time of this writing (Dec 7, 2009), Vanilla 2 is currently unreleased and only available from GitHub. It has not been thoroughly tested across server platforms, there are bugs and incomplete features. Despite these facts, the community forum at VanillaForums.org/discussions runs Vanilla 2, as does the forum hosting service at VanillaForums.com.
None of this would be possible without the amazing group of developers, supporters, and fans at the Vanilla Community Forums. To name a few:
| Edited August 2010 by Mark |