Is Vanilla Right For Me?

Roswell

Hello all, I'm looking around at forum systems and would like a bit of input before I decide on anything. Vanilla looks very attractive, but I was wondering if it would be able to serve this purpose: I hope to build a website around a forum system for one of my open source scripts. I want to be able to do things like restrict posting access in certain forums, grab a list of topics in a particular forum and display them on the home page, etc. Additionally, my board will eventually end up being fairly large, and I'm not sure whether Vanilla would support this purpose, or if I should consider "heavier" solutions like phpBB, IPB, vB, etc. Thanks guys!

Ben

Vanilla can do anything you want it to.

It has a fantastic support for custom Extensions which 'heavier' solutions lack.

Roswell

How heavy is the learning curve to write custom extensions should I need additional features that current extensions don't allow for?

squirrel

If you are already a script programmer? Very light.

I've written extensions for phpBB, it's a nightmare. Vanilla is much easier.

Roswell

Alright. One last question: Is there any way to customise the display of the home page? I'm not much for the pile-up of content in other categories, and would prefer to have something like a list of categories with the number of posts/comments in each. Is this possible?

Fyorl

It's always possible using a custom theme but it sort of detracts from one of the main features of Vanilla. Vanilla has this problem with new users in that they're so used to the traditional forum model that they feel uncomfortable with the way it works by default. Is there any reason you want to give your users more clicks to get to the posts they want?

SlashedZero

Sure, you can use the categories page as the default page or use something like Discussion Overview.