I have talked plenty of times with you before on free forum scripts you can easily setup and run from your web hosting account.  By far, the most unique one I have seen is Vanilla.  The Vanilla Forums script is a great open-source, standards compliant forum script.  However, that is not what impresses me.  The thing that impresses me the most is the fact that is stands out from the rest of the crowd and refreshes the idea of what a set of forums should look like.

What Makes Vanilla Special?

Now a simple audio podcast can not do justice to how graphically different this forum script looks and feels.  Rather than having a list of subforums, and within those having threads, right from the start you are seeing all of the most recent threads that have been posted on.  That brings you the proverbial meat and potatoes right off the bat.  You can categorize your posts into different subforums, but that is a secondary option rather than the first.  When you visit a forum, you want to see the new stuff first.  The fact that Vanilla-powered forums do that right off the bat is just amazing.  I wish more forum scripts would try this different approach.

You have full support for themes and add-ons, so you can really get down and dirty when it comes to customizing the look and feel you want your forums to have.  The documentation is lacking in a few areas, but overall it does get the job done.

Here are a few more amazing features that  I am sure you will enjoy:

• Embed Vanilla – You can very simply embed your set of Vanilla forums within your website.
• Social Connect – Let users sign into your forums with their login details from OpenID, Google, Twitter or Facebook.
• Vanilla Connect – quickly embed details about your Vanilla forum in your WordPress blog.

You can also import your forum posts from just about any other forum script into Vanilla with their easy import option too.

Overall, Vanilla amazes me, plain and simple.  If more script developers out there thought outside of the box like these guys do, we would have a wider selection of great looking websites.

You can go download Vanilla and install it yourself at vanillaforums.org.

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© Mitch Keeler 2011 | Check out my firefox help site and my tech blog too!