Vanilla - Thank you
So I manage this well-established and well-known community and for several years now, we have been using SMF. We haven't given it another thought, since it suited our needs. As a traditional forum software, it's not completely terrible...
But it is.
That is if you're a designer, like me. It's a nightmare to code and design for. It still uses tables! What is this, the year 2003? I was frustrated and pulling my hair out with trying to develop this new design for my SMF based forum.
I browsed around for alternatives, and the usual suspects turned up. It dawned on me, "Why is the entire internet moving forward having rich, easy to digest web apps, but forums remain in the dark ages?" - So I did some research to search for some "modern" forum software, there are a lot of great paid-for solutions, but I support open source as a philosophy - which ultimately led me to Vanilla Forums.
I did some snooping around of the layout and feel, I saw that there is a even a bootstrap theme (unfortunately it's bootstrap 2), there is even a tool for exporting my old SMF forum. Simply heaven.
The icing on the cake is when I saw just how easy it is to modify and design. In two hours, I made more progress than I had in a full day of work designing for SMF.
My favorite part of Vanilla is the discussions page, where it shows all of the recent discussions taking place. Information is easier to digest and quicker to access.
I could talk all day about how revolutionary Vanilla Forums is - but I'll cut it short and suffice it to a big.
Comments
Thank you!
It is good to have more people that agree with me about SMF. I had the same issues with styling it when I was testing forums. Not to mention the addon section... for SMF.
There simply is no better option than Vanilla !
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I agree with @vrijvlinder - I never looked back since I've migrated from SMF to Vanilla.
Ugh, yeah SMF was a pain. But before phpBB 3, it was quite a good and more concentrated community. phpBB 3 obviously made a lot things better... still it's amazing how many people have been contributing in these huge projects. Vanilla does a good job but still has its weaknesses in search, moderation, non-code themeing, etc.