Hi, everyone. I need to implement a forum for my site. While I review the documentation I would like to know the differences between vanilla and "for example:PHPBB"
Well I don't know phpBB very much, but what I know is that Vanilla is very light, and it's power comes from the add-ons engines (themes and extensions), that will make your Vanilla Forum do what you want. Don't forget to have a look at the extensions and themes that the community created for you.
Vanilla is basically a forum without the extra's. Software like phpBB, VBulletin, IPB comes with a load of extra functions which arnt always used.
The more functions and extra bits there are, the more it becomes harder for the software itself to be flexible.
Vanilla's core is very light. By this I mean, it hasnt got the excess stuff. Any feature that you want to add can be coded. This was vanilla remains extremely flexible when it coms to integration & doing other cool stuff.
When you first download Vanilla, it will be nothing like phpBB... but once you realise you can add/create an add-on to do anything, you will begin to see that Vanilla is polymorphous... it can become anything.
I second on the whisper system.. too bad it's going to be excluded. (as part of the core atleast). Just another example of how the core is made to be more and more flexible.
Although technically the whisper system is brilliant and I have used it with much success, I have disabled it on my forum.
I figured if people wanted to communicate in private they could simply email each other.
There have been times when someone mistakenly replied to a whisper in public and cause a bit of a stir. It could be construed as a bit rude (whispering behind peoples' backs) but no worse than a BCC in an email I guess.
@Wanderer: did the "reply to a whisper in public" occur through a quote extension ? This problem gives me the idea of an extension that would just display a notice like "Be aware that you are quoting a whisper (cancel/ok).". Though I never used a quote extension and don't know if a whisper can be quoted.
Anything can be quoted presumably but that doesnt help much if they're not quoting them I guess. You could have it warn you if there's a whisper on the page and you're not whispering to anyone but that would get pretty annoying. Sometimes you just have to leave the user to their carelessness.
Agreed, I don't want to give a warning for every reply. But for people who gave a "quote extension" to Vanilla, it could be an enhancement to their code: if a comment is quoting a whisper, just warn the poster. I'm gonna start a little discussion about this, to stop hijacking this one.