Vanilla Forums Plugin

Not a Vanilla Forum owner? Create one here

Community Forums Evolved.

At Vanilla, we believe that online communities should be unique, intuitive and engaging. Vanilla allows you to create a customized community that rewards positive participation, automatically curates content and lets members drive moderation.

Vanilla provides hosted and open source community forum software that powers discussion forums on over 500,000 sites. Built for flexibility and integration, Vanilla is the best, most powerful community solution in the world.

Vanilla focuses on easy integration with WordPress, and is the ONLY forum solution to provide a native mobile version for easy browsing and posting from any mobile device.

Vanilla benefits from the power of open-source, with over 10,000 developers contributing to the project and over 500 addons that can make your community do anything you need it to do. Vanilla is truly open-source, standards-compliant, and fully customizable.

Migrating to Vanilla from any other forum platform is a breeze, with ready-made exporters for vBulletin, phpBB, bbPress, and more.

• NEW: BLOG COMMENTS: Vanilla’s blog commenting system will kick start a community forum to help quickly build an engaged community of readers. This is a drop-in replacement for your native WordPress blog comments (and for other commenting tools like disqus or livefyre). New blog posts & comments will be mirrored in the forum, using all the power of Vanilla to keep your blog readership engaged and bring new pageviews to your site through your community forum.

• Easy to install: Add the Vanilla Forums plugin and instantly integrate your Vanilla Forum with your blog.

• Embed your forum right in your blog: No theming required. Install this plugin and define where you’d like your forum to appear.

• Add forum widgets to your blog: Place widgets throughout your blog with information like: recent discussions, discussion categories, and recent forum activity.

• Manage your forum in WordPress: Manage your Vanilla forum without leaving the comfort of your wordpress dashboard.

1. Upload the vanilla-forums folder to /wp-content/plugins/
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Configure the plugin in the WordPress Settings > Vanilla Forum menu

See our handy installation video here

Q. What is Vanilla Forums?

Vanilla is forum software that powers discussions on over 400,000 sites around the world. Vanilla is the best solution for starting and growing your community, offering groundbreaking user interface that makes sense to your users.

Q. How do I install the Vanilla Forums WordPress Plugin

To install the Plugin you must get it from your Vanilla forum’s Embed Vanilla page. If you are not a Vanilla Forum owner already, you can create one here.

Q. Why use Vanilla for blog comments?

• A single profile, reputation and user experience across the community and the comments.
• Engage commenters with Vanilla’s existing gamification and curation features.
• Use blog traffic to quickly seed community participation and vice versa.

Q. How do Vanilla Comments work?

Embedding Vanilla Comments into your blog will insert a comment window at the bottom of each article. If the reader is not signed in, they will be prompted to do so using the Vanilla login form as you’ve configured it (SSO, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and OpenID options available). The comments are displayed below the article and simultaneously a new discussion thread is created in the forum. Hosted customer also have the option of Disqus sign-in integration.

Q. What about my existing comments?

Vanilla is offering a comment importing service. Please contact us if you would like more information about this. It is on our roadmap to release tools to automate comment imports.

We can also help you set up your blog so that existing comments remain in the old system and only new comments get created with Vanilla.

Q. How is Vanilla different from other commenting systems such as Disqus and Intense Debate?

Vanilla provides an integrated comment and forum community that will increase your readership engagement. We understand how to reward positive behaviour, get people to participate in a community and help the community drive moderation and curation. Vanilla now brings all that to your comments.

We don’t have all the features that stand alone commenting systems have but we are working on many that we see as important such as pre-moderation, integration into blogging software dashboards and automated imports of legacy comments.

Q. Can I use this with Vanilla Forums self-hosted?

Yes, you can use this with your self-hosted Vanilla Forums install.

Q. Can I see some examples of Vanilla Comment implementations?

• http://www.shipstation.com/blog/
• http://campcomic.com
• http://unknownworlds.com/
• http://battlebears.com/
• https://blog.vanillaforums.com/