Interview with Shadowdare
What first brought you to Vanilla Forums?
I first came across Vanilla Forums when a website I registered on switched from vBulletin to Vanilla Forums. The modern user interface and user friendliness of Vanilla Forums is what appealed to me from the start, and I also noticed that big websites such as the Penny Arcade and the Marvel Heroes are built with Vanilla Forums.
What do you like best about Vanilla Forums?
What I like most about Vanilla Forums is that it is built on a framework called Garden, which is very extensible through applications, plugins, and themes. This helps web developers, designers, and even administrators rapidly produce features they need for websites through easy to read and maintainable code.
What is one thing you recommend to those starting out using the Open Source version of Vanilla Forums?
The most helpful thing to do first is to look through the documentation for setting up a Vanilla Forum which can be found on open source website. The next thing would be to search through the forum via the search box on the discussions page to see if any questions have already been answered or brought up recently.
When posting a support question, it is important to leave many details about the problem as possible as well as the Vanilla version number to help narrow things down. It is also important to know that responses can take more than a few hours and even several days for others to respond if they have an answer.
What are your interests outside of Vanilla Forums? Any fascinating facts about yourself that you would like to share with the Vanilla Forums community?
Outside of Vanilla Forums, which is built with the PHP programming language, I am interested and experienced in other programming languages including C++, C, C#, and VB.NET. I also am a tech and gaming enthusiast,
What is the story behind your Avatar Picture?
I like to change up my avatar from time to time and thought about switching to something more scenic. I searched up images of the safari and the picture of the giraffes popped up and looked pretty fantastic, and it seems that other members have come to like it as well.
Do you have any other things to share?
Vanilla Forums is a great way to get started with not just creating a discussion board, but also building a community around a safe, extendable, and clean software that is powerful, not bloated, and easy to install and manage.