Vanilla Forums

Business model

Vanilla Cloud is funded in part by a custom, non-distributed hosted implementation of the software run as a commercial SaaS, by Vanilla Forums, Inc. offering various plans with support options.

Hosted plans offer many features from the open source version with additional premium add-ons supported by the core team.

Vanilla OSS is supported by the original core team with help by the community.

Features

Vanilla OSS is a free, FOSS, extensible and multi-lingual forum system. The following items describe the open source version:

• Users can easily set up and maintain a full-featured discussion forum with unlimited categories
• A variety of community made themes and add-ons are available.
• Single sign-on
• Social media login
• Embeddable forums
• Import from other forums
• Commenting system for a site
• Integrates with other FOSS projects, like WordPress

History

Mark O'Sullivan created an early version of Vanilla to support his own online graphic design and programming community. Between 2002 and 2005, this alpha version of the forum went through many revisions, and the core theming and plugin engines were built, culminating in the release of Vanilla OSS.

Vanilla increased in popularity and was invited to TechStars 2009 in Boulder. At the start of 2010 Vanilla received 500,000 CAD in series A funding. In July 2010, Vanilla Cloud was released, which was a complete rewrite of Vanilla OSS.

Acquisition by Higher Logic

In May 2021, Vanilla was acquired by Higher Logic, a customer engagement company based in Arlington, Virginia. The acquisition expanded Higher Logic’s capabilities in online communities and support forums. Since the acquisition, Vanilla has been integrated into the Higher Logic Vanilla product line.

Vanilla OSS

Vanilla OSS has a very lightweight core with a number of optional plugins, including chat, private messages, "Who's Online", and attachments.

The most recent version (2.6.3) was released on September 23, 2018.

Vanilla OSS is still maintained by the Vanilla team with help of the user community.

Vanilla Cloud

Vanilla Cloud is a complete rewrite of Vanilla using the Garden Framework, an MVC, object oriented, modular, extendable framework.

New core features in Vanilla Cloud:

• GPL importer for other forum systems such as vBulletin and phpBB.
• Vanilla (embed forum anywhere via JavaScript)
• Social Connect
• Vanilla Mobile - Configuration required
• Vanilla Connect (Single Sign In)
• Themes
• Banner
• File Upload - included as a plugin
• WYSIWYG Editor - included as a plugin
• Emoticons - included as a plugin

Garden

Garden is the PHP framework on which Vanilla Cloud is built, and deployed with, but can also be used as an MVC framework in its own right, and has a convention-based folder structure.

When downloading a Vanilla release, it is packaged in Garden as an application.

Garden can be developed on via 'Addons' of applications, plugins, themes, and locales.

Each application follows the MVC paradigm, and applications are typically placed in the applications folder, plugins in plugins folder, and so on.

Applications can be extended by plugins and themes, these mainly use a combination of convention based file structure, configuration, and event hooks.

Pluggability is a core feature of the framework, as is object-oriented programming, so the application and core is mainly extended via plugin classes using a public method naming convention to denote event hooks, 'magic event' hooks, 'magic methods', and occasionally method overrides. Some general functions in the core can be overridden by predefining them.

In addition, locales can be used to translate into different languages, or variations of text, which are replaced by reference.

Release history

Hosted forums

The hosted version of Vanilla runs on the newest version of Vanilla. It also provides features that are held back from the community edition (usually people who are self-hosting their forum). The features held back are Reactions & Badges, Polls, User Ranks, and enterprise integrations such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and GitHub (among others). This leads to ongoing discussions in Vanilla's own community forums. There have been numerous discussions in the past about the business model and why certain features have been held back. The community version of the software has seen developers replicate many of these functionalities.

References

References

1. "vanilla/LICENSE.md". GitHub.
2. (May 2021). "JMI Equity-backed Higher Logic acquires Vanilla Forums". PE Hub.
3. "Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting.".
4. Gunter, Tim. "Vanilla Emotify Plugin".
5. "Another Look at Vanilla: Online Communities Reinvented". appstorm.net.
6. "Designing A Hosting Platform Around High Availability, Low Cost". Rackspace Hosting.
7. (28 March 2012). "Booting the jerks from discussion forums". The Globe and Mail.
8. (25 April 2012). "Difference between self-hosted vanilla vs Vanilla hosted". Vanilla Forums.
9. Miles, Stephanie. "App Vita".
10. "Browse Addons". Vanilla Forums.
11. "What are Features and Addons?". homebrewforums.net.
12. "Vanilla Documentation". vanillaforums.org.
13. "Canadian software company improves on the Internet forum". IT World Canada.
14. (30 November 2012). "Vanilla Forums". Vanilla Forums Blog.
15. Charles Hamilton. "Hosted Community App Vanilla Forums Now Embeddable". gigaom.com.
16. "Montreal's Vanilla Forums Launches New Commenting Feature to Help Cultivate Online Communities". techvibes.com.
17. "WordPress › Vanilla Forums « WordPress Plugins". WordPress.org.
18. "Vanilla Forums". Vanilla Forums Blog.
19. "Vanilla 1 Documentation Archive".
20. (6 August 2009). "TechStars Incubator Hatches 10 New Companies". AOL.
21. "Vanilla Forums Receives $500,000 (CAD) Round A Funding for Its Innovative, Open Source Community Forum Software - Business Wire". businesswire.com.
22. (July 22, 2010). "Vanilla Forums Gets Investment, Releases New Version".
23. (May 4, 2021). "Arlington-based Higher Logic acquires Montreal's Vanilla".
24. (May 13, 2022). "Higher Logic Relaunches Vanilla Community Product". Information Today.
25. "The forum is dead, long live Vanilla". Boagworld - Web & Digital Advice.
26. "Vanillaforums's VanillaPorter".
27. "cakephp - Forum/Board written atop one of the big PHP Frameworks - Stack Overflow". stackoverflow.com.
28. (28 October 2018). "Mark O'Sullivan • Garden Preview Part I". markosullivan.ca.
29. "Vanilla". homebrewforums.net.
30. "How to Build a Simple Module and Integrate it as a Plugin". homebrewforums.net.
31. "Releases · vanilla/vanilla".
32. Burry, Todd. (4 August 2010). "Vanilla Community Forums".
33. (12 November 2015). "Vanilla is proud to present version 2.2".
34. (24 May 2016). "Vanilla 2.3 beta".
35. (30 January 2017). "Preview release: 2.4 beta".
36. (15 March 2019). "Vanilla 2.8.1 is now available - Security Patches & Bug Fixes".
37. (10 June 2019). "Vanilla 3.0 is now available (Updated 3.0.2)".
38. (10 July 2019). "Vanilla 3.1 is now available".
39. (4 September 2019). "Vanilla 3.2 is now available".
40. (28 October 2019). "Vanilla 3.3 is now available".
41. Stubbs, Ryan. "App Storm".
42. (25 June 2013). "The Community and Vanilla - Please Read". Vanilla Forums.
43. "Yet Another Gamification Application 1.0.3 by hgtonight". Vanilla Forums.