Is Vanilla for me?

seitest

Hello,

I'm trying to set up a forum to deal with a specific mental health thing, so that people can come together and support each other. I am not a programming genius although I can code a basic nice looking site.

After being super excited thinking I could write my own forum software, I quickly (instantly) dropped that idea the second I realized that it's an insane project for one person to undertake, let alone maintain and update.

So I started looking at different forum software, but it's very hard for me to get a good overview because each site mentions its software's strengths and functionality differently. I have the following needs:

• Free software in case of self hosting on own domain(which I will do)
• Extendable with plugins
• Ability to have a time-tracking plugin on a person's profile
• Ability to have custom stats on a profile people can see
• Admin + mods
• Email confirmation, spam protection
• Lots of customization (theming and location of certain items on page) through hopefully something like CSS.

I think that's it - would you guys say that Vanilla would work for me?

Thank you kindly and I'm looking forward to your answers.😀

Bleistivt

Free software in case of self hosting on own domain(which I will do)

Yes

Extendable with plugins

Yes

Ability to have a time-tracking plugin on a person's profile

I don't know of such a plugin, but it could certainly be written depending on your proficiency in PHP

Ability to have custom stats on a profile people can see

If you mean custom profile fields, then yes, that plugin is included

Admin + mods

Yes

Email confirmation, spam protection

Yes

Lots of customization (theming and location of certain items on page) through hopefully something like CSS.

Yes. Note that editing or overwriting the HTML generated by the views is discouraged as it complicates updating, so it should be done using CSS (and JavaScript) only.