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.
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?
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?