Video Interview with Founder of Vanilla, "A WordPress for Forums"
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Longtime forum moderator Mark O'Sullivan's Vanilla, an open-source, standards-compliant, fully extensible discussion forum CMS, is a favorite of many designers and webmasters alike.
One reviewer said it best: "Forget how 'normal' forums are done - Vanilla strips it back to what's important: the conversations. Not the smileys, the bandwidth-hogging signatures, the mailbox, the forum categories. It pushes discussions to the forefront and uses subtle AJAX to make the experience of communicating with others fast and simple." Read and watch on for a discussion of the product itself as well as open-source monetization and forum culture versus the real-time web.
Vanilla was selected for this summer's TechStars program, and the public beta for Vanilla 2 was released this April 27.
O'Sullivan actually wrote a follow-up blog post regarding our brief chat about how the real-time web and its constant firehose of information are affecting forum discussions and culture. "There is an intrinsic value in being able to take part in a discussion on your own time," he wrote. "We can't all be online, let alone awake at the same time, so in these situations the real-time web doesn't work. Forums are always on, and they are expected to operate on a different schedule than real-time."
And while O'Sullivan continues to write that there isn't a competition between real-time and forum discussions, he does state that the quality of forum information can often be much higher than info procured from real-time sources, in his opinion.
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Vanilla is definitely one of the cleanest discussion forum script. Its very pleasing to use vanilla, it does not have much clutter and it just shows the areas where focus is needed. Not sure, but i think vanilla also uses very less bandwidth when compared to other top Discussion Forum Scripts.
My Best Wishes to Mark,
Raja,
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That's an interesting interview as usual, but I notice two little recurring problems in this interviews: audio and colors.
The audio is a bit low, particularly compared to the ReadWriteWeb Video signature. Colors doesn't look quite right in indoor settings, you can see it better in the previous video that has both inside and outside.
These are minor annoyances in an otherwise great video, but it makes all less enjoyable.
We use vanilla in office for different project communication.
The only weakness of this software is poor user management.
Example: if you want to delete user from forum the only effective way is to do it in database:)))
On the other hand:
Clean interaction. Simple interface. Plugin architecture.
Yes, this is The WordPress for forums.
I love Vanilla, clean and understandable. I'm gonna start me a new forum soon, guess what I'm gonna use?! haha.
Cheers! Fun interview btw, they obviously like each other too ha!
For those that like bb like forums. yes Vanilla is definitely the best and most modern choice. the biggest feature has to be easy theming.
But my favorite Forum form must be DelphiF. the last take on that is the Beehive Forum Project. but would love to see a current take on it on newer web tech.
What is interesting is that things like uservoice and getsatisfaction ate most of the general forum market now and for companies and corporations the private forums were left behind the adoption of integrated solutions like Sharepoint. i have seen very few vanilla implementations this year. i wonder how many installed vanilla forums there are?.
That's an interesting set of comments about the value of forum discussions over real time chat interaction. While I agree that they have different strengths, I disagree that there is no competition. I see good forums dying as people spend the limited time that they do have for online socializing in Twitter, Second Life, IM and other livetime platforms.
We throw a lot of company resources, both people and technology, at the "Listening" side of the social media landscape. I think it is a good perspective to comment from because we are often evaluating for clients the relative positive/negative of each type of platform.
An active Forum can function in near real-time, but the real strength is in its ability to be both synchronous and asynchronous. As a result we see much more in-depth and content rich conversation going on. This is where most of the "Which one should I use?", "Is X better than Y?", etc. happens.
Realtime insights we see tend to be great for identifying breaking issues, particularly around things like customer service.
To use a personal bicycle example - I'll tweet my ride today, but when i am comparing components or what bike to buy than I am on the forums asking. One does not necessarily replace the other.
What we do see happening is a consolidation of forums - lot's of smaller ones dying and the interest user base being consolidated. Several reasons for this - and certainly the rise of realtime use is a major factor. Users expect the instant gratification of posting something and getting an immediate response. A forum needs scale to do that or it dies.
Aaron Mann
http://social-arc.com
Hi,
features are nice, but I really get the impression that most Bulletin Board software is bugged to te bone. Forget features, I want something that works! How good is Vanilla is that respect? Everyone still seems to be using phpBB, which has to be the worst, so I don't get it.
Ariel
The problem with vanilla is that its community is dieing. I've been using and following Vanilla for some years now, and the truth is that developers are not that active right now. I think Vanilla should focus on building the developer community a little bit more.
I agree with Y - Vanilla is amazing software but it lacks a robust user and developer community. I suspect adding a half dozen new, quality themes would have a tremendous impact on the number of people installing Vanilla and might help spark a larger developer community.
Vanilla is a great product. Always glad to see some open source love. Quality interview Jolie.
Yayhooray lore states that Threadless was actually named from an original t-shirt contest Dreamless.org.
Kudos actually go to Joshua Davis of praystation for that one, but o8 was fun while it lasted.
I am a fan of what Vanilla is and is trying to become. However, it's not easy to wrap it in a template, and I hope that is something they are working on.
In short: Great on it's own, but integration sucks.
Thanks to everyone for the great feedback!
Vanilla 2 has many vast improvements over Vanilla 1, and this time we're working much harder (and full-time) at making it a viable solution for people. Yes, theming/skinning is WAY better in Vanilla 2, not to mention existing system integrations.
We should be coming out of beta very soon.
Regarding "A WordPress for Forums": I’ve heard people say that a few times now, and I think people see the correlation because WordPress and Vanilla are both open source projects, they both focus on delivering something elegant and easy to use, and now we're trying to do with Vanilla what WordPress has already done by creating a hosted offering.
The bottom line is that WordPress is amazing, and I find the comparison very flattering.
Mark, you rock, and I've heard many awesome things about Vanilla since our interview. Thanks again for taking the time to chat with me, and keep us updated about your progress! The hosted offering especially is intriguing. Making simple, forum-based communities accessible to the masses would be a sweet development. Are there any products for that floating around currently?
Hi fives, good luck, and talk to you soon!
That's an interesting interview as usual.
Thanks Jolie!
There are actually a ton of different forums that offer hosting packages. None of them take the approach we do, however, and I think that's why so many people love Vanilla.