Vanilla is a break-through in forum software. It focuses on what’s important, the discussions, rather than categories. It introduces a fresh forum experience with better structure designed to help the users. It’s also free. Nothing beats Vanilla. Every webmaster with a decent forum membership should consider swapping. Vanilla is delicious to the eyes.

From their website:

Meet Vanilla: a new kind of web forum

With Vanilla we wanted to break the mold created and followed by just about every other forum on the web. We sat down and thought about what we liked, and more importantly, what we didn’t like about web forums. We wanted emphasis on the discussions rather than the statistics. We wanted to stop using MSN or AIM to send secret messages to other forum members; We wanted to be able to save the common searches. Basically, we wanted the thing to work for us instead of against us. Most importantly we wanted it to be free and we wanted it to run on just about every web server out there. So, Vanilla is a PHP / MySQL solution that is 100% open-source. You can take it and alter it and use it free of charge. The GPL is your friend.

Read the rest of this entry »