Vanilla vs Flarum

ngakaks

I am a user of Vanilla and I love Vanilla, but...

Flarum present as a newcomer, but it seems to have seized the attention of many people. (As a modern forum)

Look at the enthusiasm of users on Github:

Vanilla

Flarum

I know though Flarum is not yet released to the public, but it could further heat up the competition. Vanilla must continue to innovate.

The Text Editor, (good and stable without plugins) especially with BBCode features, Markdown, and HTML is very important to attract market demand.

Keep the spirit! Good luck!

Bleistivt

I think Flarum is going to have a hard time taking a similar direction (full javascript UI, app-like interface) to discourse and nodeBB which are already on the market and being actively used in the wild.

But I really like what EsoTalk has brought to the table, so if it is going to have a unique selling point, this is definitely going to be interesting.

Linc

@ngakaks I initially saw your screenshots and looked at the number of "stars", which I assume was your point in posting them. Today, all I see is the contributors, commits, and releases numbers. At the end of the day, I like those metrics for enthusiasm more than a fly-by +1.

Sicnus

Not sure if I'm supposed to chime in here or not... but it seems to me that Flarum is trying to do a lot of what VF is. Why wouldn't they simply chip in and help with VF to embrace and extend it further?

Edit: other thought...

There is a lot of folks that want to re-invent the wheel when they probably don't need to. But that's just my take on a lot of split projects. They feel like they end up being Ego-driven / political and not really community driven.

Linc

@Sicnus said:
it seems to me that Flarum is trying to do a lot of what VF is.

I would go so far as to say their philosophy is nearly identical, except for this:

Unopinionated feature-set

I don't see Vanilla as having a shortage of opinions, nor do I think it's possible to build software without them. We will continue to add opinionated features to core as we make decisions about them, but we do so understanding that every community is different, and accommodating our wide experiences with hundreds of different forums. Plugins will always be at our core, but truly great design can transcend the need for so much tinkering.

Anonymoose

@Linc said:
accommodating our wide experiences with hundreds of different forums. Plugins will always be at our core, but truly great design can transcend the need for so much tinkering.

This is Key. Vanilla was started by someone who wanted to write a better forum script for his own forum, not someone who wanted to code because he likes to boost his ego. Vanilla continues to be worked while in the business of hosting actual forums for other people. Who would you rather rely on from a business point of view? Someone who uses their own software to host hundreds of sites and gets paid to do it, or someone who's out to code endless features for the heck of it? Chalk it up for Vanilla.

x00

Unopinionated feature-set

what does this even mean?

Anonymoose

@flarum said:
Unopinionated feature-set

@x00 said:
what does this even mean?

They are so afraid of having an opinion themselves, they've phrased it in a way that makes it sounds like the feature-set itself has the ability to have an opinion. So what kinds of opinions can a feature-set have about itself? What do feature-set think about in their spare time? Are feature-sets opinionated about their performance? Sounds like a fairly ridiculous concept someone thought sounded cool. It probably means they have decided, from a management point of view, not to have an opinion on other's people's opinion of what and what not should be included in the feature set, because they are afraid of making those choices or haven't figured out the criteria for making them. Another way of saying they support feature creep and haven't figured out their project scope but are marketing this as a positive feature.