afternoon all i am looking around for a solution for a project, one of the key requirements for which focuses on the reports that the organisation can get showing user activity, who posted what, when and how often, forum activity active discussions inactive discussion, recent posts....that sort of thing.
vanilla ticks my boxes on extensibilty, nice simple clean interface but i need to make sure its reporting and security layers meet the grade also. anyone care to share any pointers? regards
Vanilla has no reporting built in, other than what you see when you look at a particular page--i.e. last visit and number of posts on a profile page.
You can do some advanced searches to see all comments/topics by a user, sort the user's list by the date they've last been on the site etc. Add-ons can be made to capture or display additional data, like IP History, Forum Statistics, and User Filters or User Tasks.
SQL can be used for more advanced reporting against the database, i.e. sort topics by number of users who have read them.
Security is good--user passwords are hashed before saving to the database, and vulnerable code is usually fixed with a new release within a week of its discovery. There is an update check that reminds administrators to run periodically to make sure they have the latest version. Vanilla's authentication is modular, so you can even plug in an existing site membership system with some minor tweaking. There are some examples of this done with MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal, and now Pligg.