What is the difference between Vanilla 1 & 2?

jeph

What is the difference between Vanilla 1 & 2?
I see that 1.2 is coming out soon, so that means that Vanilla 2 is not a major version bump of 1. So it seems like they are independent of each other?

Got any idea when Vanilla 2 will be in Stable Version?
Is it in Alpha or Beta right now?

Mark

Vanilla 2 is under heavy development right now. It is currently stable on our development platform, but we're still making minor bugfixes & doing cleanup. When that is all done, we are going to start testing across platform & php versions - that can take a long time and is very hard to predict.

We don't want to put it out there and have a million people come back saying that it broke during install.

Mark

Oh- and Vanilla 2 is a completely different codebase, and yes - they're being developed independent of each other right now.

jeph

Thank you for your comments. But I still really have no idea what the difference between the two are.

Lets assume hypothetically that right now Vanilla 2 is stable for production.
When would you use Vanilla 2?
Why would you use Vanilla 2?
Why would you use Vanilla 1.2?
When would you use Vanilla 1.2?

I could not find anywhere in the docs what the differences are.

For instance, take Drupal for example. Drupal 6 is stable and is what you want to use for production. Drupal 7 is in Alpha. When Drupal 7 becomes stable, you don't want to use Drupal 6 anymore for production. It is the same software, just an upgrade.

From what I am getting about Vanilla, is that Vanilla 1 is a completely different product than Vanilla 2. So Vanilla 2 is not an upgrade from Vanilla 1, and when Vanilla 2 become stable, you will still want to use Vanilla 1 for production because they are completely different products.

Am I right about this? I gather that this community really has no idea.

Just because it is a completely different codebase doesn't answer the question. What are the differences? What is Vanilla 1 for? What is Vanilla 2 for?

Pinocchio

Seems like the developers don't know either. Sorry for saying that, but they don't know the approximate release date even for alpha. You can't really compare Drupal with Vanilla, because the attitudes of developers of these two projects are completely different. With Drupal you always know what to use and when to use and when to await a new release, i.e next month, next year, next two years or something like that. Here developers say "use it on your own risk", "it's done when it's done", etc. Basically no responsibility for their own product. I'd really pay for Vanilla 2, because the idea of how it works is better than any other discussion board, but all those things mentioned above stop me from even using it "until it's done".

No offends though, it's how it is right now. I come to visit vanillaforums.org sometimes just to see a progress. Hopefully sometimes in the future there will be a good stable "mature" release. I'd even pay for that a good price.

Stash

@Pinocchio, I think perhaps you're being a little harsh given that V2 is a complete rewrite. It is essentially a completely new product to V1 and has been built from the ground up to scale better (probably V1's greatest weakness) and to be even easier to extend/modify.

How old is Drupal now? Getting on for 10 years? Version 4 came out 8 years ago! I'm sure once Vanilla 2 has several major versions behind it, 5+ years of development and several hundred (thousand?) contributing developers that it will be able to better stick to deadlines.

Looks like Drupal has exactly the same criticisms of "use [at] your own risk", "it's done when it's done" as V2. I'm not a Drupal hater, I appreciate what Drupal does, but please don't hold them up as a paragon of timeliness and punctuality.

I hope I'm not coming across too agressive/defensive, I just don't want things to get blown out of proportion.

@jeph, you asksome sensible questions that haven't been answered thoroughly yet. While I don't know enough to answer them fully, from what I understand, Vanilla 1 is an excellent, minimalist forum for smaller communities but tricky to keep performance high as your numbers get realy big. It's also a cinch to setup and run as a stand alone forum!

Vanilla 2 should hopefully address the performance drawback to V1 while still retaining the minimalist elegance that V1 had. It looks to be even more easily extensible than V1 and to allow even greater freedom to the plugin authors (I have no experience of this, it's just what I read here on the forums and on the blog).

V2 is already easier to use in conjunction with other web applications due to the Single Sign-On plugin, so if you want to integrate a forum/community with an existing website, it should be better/easier with V2.

I'm sure that @Mark or @Todd can better answer these questions as and when they get time

jeph

Thank you both. I "kind of" know more now, lol.

And just to clarify, I was not at all comparing Vanilla to Drupal. It was just that my question was not answered directly, so I needed something (anything) to visualize with to get my point across.


So I could use your guy's advice. I am in the middle of a project, which should be done in 3-4 months. I have always used punbb for forums, but want to use something different this time. Should I use V1, or use V2 thinking it will be stable in 3-4 months? It will just be on a local dev server. I have never used Vanilla before 5 days ago, but I really enjoy it so far. The scalability scares me a little bit for V1. Any advice?

Stash

Depending on what exactly you're doing V2 *might be alright for you to use now. It is stable enough to run these forums afterall!

Do you need to integrate with other systems?
How many members are you going to have?

jeph

Very true!

It will be integrated with Drupal, Kayako and Amember. Vanilla would be strictly used as a forum.

What makes Vanilla shaky for scaling? When and what makes it vulnerable? Is it the number of users? The number of Discussions? The number of posts? And at what number?

blizeH

I'd go with version 2 - we just started using it and impressions have been really positive so far! It is fairly buggy at times I have to say, but there's an awesome team working on it, so hopefully it won't be too long before an update is released that'll go some way to fixing them

Stash

Given that you're looking to integrate it with several other packages I would really look into going with V2. There's going to be a lot more work done on making V2 play nice with other software than V1.

jeph

Thanks a lot for all of your information everyone. Looking forward to being part of this community!