Mission Statement

Enable the fast and easy creation of very simple web applications, and enable those applications to be extended and customized with plugins.

The Theory of Garden

After the release of Vanilla 1, we took some time off from development and watched the community grow. Over the years we received a lot of feedback from the community, and we started to realize that while we'd created something special, we could do it better. A common question we received went something like this:

I really like Vanilla, and I want to use the Vanilla code to write the rest of my website. Can you help me?

We were actually very surprised by these requests, and as time wore on and we started to think about what we were going to release next, we stumbled upon another important realization: Almost every application we dreamed up required users, roles, permissions, and massive customization. So, before we could begin working on our next big idea, we'd need to spend almost a month creating this application infrastructure.

The Garden Platform was created so that developers can dive right into working on their awesome idea without wasting any time worrying about their infrastructure. In our case, we decided that there was still a lot of room for growth with discussion forums, so after Garden was stable, we started working on Vanilla 2. We summed up all of the hours we spent working on Vanilla 2, and the total was just over 2 weeks from the first line to the last EOF.

What really makes Garden special, though, is it's revolutionary plugin architecture. We spent uncountable hours researching different plugin methodologies and doing test after test with PHP to find the best possible way to allow developers to extend the base applications in a way that was easy to implement and also prevented plugin clashes (which were a common problem in Vanilla 1). During development, we found that none of our plugins ever clashed, even if they were attaching, manipulating, or replacing the same event handlers, and the most powerful plugins we created were as short as 8 lines of code.

We strongly urge all developers to take advantage of the plugin architecture in Garden not only by creating plugins for all applications written for the platform, but also by creating applications that are extremely simple. Don't spend any time adding features to your applications. Take the Vanilla approach: write your application to only serve it's core purpose, and add functionality through plugins. After all, one of the greatest benefits of this approach is the amazing community of developers that will write plugins for your applications. Saving you time and energy of development, and constantly surprising you with amazing new ideas.