Vanilla Forums 2.1 Released

Since 2009, Vanilla Forums, makers of popular open source community has seen their product downloaded over 700k times. Today they have announced a new major open source version available at http://vanillaforums.org. There has been over 8,639 code commits made by the community and the Vanilla Forums team to make this release a reality.

“This release makes it significant easier to customize Vanilla and further blend it into your existing website with tighter integrations and increase engagement with you community” Lincoln Russell, who was the release manager on the 2.1 open source version.

Some of the changes in the Vanilla 2.1 product include: 

• New default theme to be easier to customize, with the Smarty template system.
• Improved the HTML structure of the entire siteEasier for plugin developers to hook into common events
• Added new Homepage & Banner options in the Dashboard 
• Social media integrations into core, so community members can easy share and login with Twitter, Facebook and more.
• Easier to do translations in more languages by rearchitecting our activity stream
• Redesigned Profiles for easier navigation
• Simplified permissions

According to Lincoln “There are too many changes to sort into some coherent summary, but users will be pleasantly surprised by what they find when they upgrade or if they are downloading Vanilla for the first time.” 

Along with the new open source release, more premium features were added to the  cloud version of Vanilla Forums including a recently announced new native Mobile Theme and Advanced Editor

Founded in December 2009, Vanilla Forums is a leader in the community platform market, offering both a robust open source product and a software-as-a-service (cloud) offering that helps provide a great community experience to millions of people worldwide.