Why dosen't Vanilla use other jQuery/PHP plugins that are open source?
AbhinavG
New
There are a lot of plugins and scripts made out by talented guys and most of them are open sourced. So why dosent vanilla inorporate them inside their official releases. There is a lot of html/css development going on too.
Its just a small suggestion from my side 
, you can look into unheap.com , webappers.com , smashingmagazine.com , tympanus.net/codrops/ for some examples.
I just felt like vanilla is a little back on newer web design and development trends. Although individuals can modify it to their needs , but some basic trends should be followed and incorporated into official releases too.
Best Answer
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Linc
Admin
@AbhinavG Great question!
Many of the things you're probably thinking of didn't exist in 2009 when the first version of Vanilla 2 was built, but we do use several already; they are in /library/vendors and /js/library. In fact, we had to roll our own version of a lot of things because we were ahead of the curve on a lot of trends - it was quite a pain. We've been fairly progressive about incorporating new packages as they come along (removing our own as appropriate) and have a lot more planned:
- We're rebuilding the default CSS with Sass.
- We're refactoring Vanilla to be a Composer package.
- We're porting a popular templating language to PHP.
- Yesterday we replaced our jQuery autogrow plugin with a more current one.
- We recently put Emoji support into core.
- We use Jekyll to build our docs.
So there's a lot in the pipeline! Thanks for checking out the project.
8
Answers
from an outside look - the more vanilla depends on other outside open-source scripts the more maintenance is involved.
as you can see just by including jquery, version changes require lots of changes in scripts. Some may become incompatible as jquery evolves and more dependencies on things in core make maintenance a nightmare.
But as you said there is nothing stopping anybody from adding other open source plugins in contained in vanilla add-ons.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
@AbhinavG Great question!
Many of the things you're probably thinking of didn't exist in 2009 when the first version of Vanilla 2 was built, but we do use several already; they are in /library/vendors and /js/library. In fact, we had to roll our own version of a lot of things because we were ahead of the curve on a lot of trends - it was quite a pain. We've been fairly progressive about incorporating new packages as they come along (removing our own as appropriate) and have a lot more planned:
So there's a lot in the pipeline! Thanks for checking out the project.
Well thats always good to hear news. Just a little thing , is it responsive(mobile-friendly), the default theme?
We use mobile detection to switch to a mobile-specific theme. We love responsive design, but it's still fairly new in the grand scheme of things and requires a lot of recalibrating on our part. We're going to do a new default theme in the next year or so, but we have to fork all the existing views & create theme inheritance to do so or we'd break backwards compatibility for everything because of how our theming system works. We've stretched our backwards compatibility a bit thin here already.
We definitely enable you to create your own responsive theme and apply it for all devices (set Garden.MobileTheme to the same value as Garden.Theme in your config). We have several cloud clients who've done this. There's definitely not a limitation in our architecture stopping you from doing that.
They still don't work when posting here.