A couple of friends and I recently installed Vanilla to be the discussion forum for a web-based collaborative project, and wanted to integrate the forum into our existing PHP system a little more tightly than just linking to it. The various feeds available didn't really do what we were looking for, so I just took the existing feeds and extensions and hacked them to do what I wanted.

I ended up with these two hacks-- a hacked version of SirNot's PreviewPost.php extension that lets you give discussion titles in GET, and a new pseudo-"feed" file that lets you programmatically search the forum remotely and returns undecorated URLs.

Anyway, I figured since I wanted it badly enough to go to the trouble of writing it, maybe someone else would want it too. More-or-less complete instructions on using them are included in the readme in that zip file.