Howdy stranger, it's been too long.
Vanilla has been hard-forked by Lincoln, one of the original developers.
It's not intended as an ongoing effort, but "one last release" to get you by.
Every locale, plugin, & theme Lincoln could find is bundled herein
It is all now under the AGPLv3.
Do NOT update to this version if you run a hosting service, because
ALL code that touches it must be released. Yes, even your cloud-only plugins.
I must do the same if I ever use it that way — no more "cloud-only" here.
This release:
* Strips HL logos, replacing with the abandoned original Vanilla logo.
* Defaults new installs to the Keystone theme and legacy layouts.
* Strips all references to cloud & fixes compatibility issues with modern PHP.
Notes:
* I'm still working on getting a built release together.
* Today, Docker install works on localhost as-documented.
* Happy to accept pull requests, but no compatibility breaks or major features.
* Bundle is MUCH larger than previously (TONS of SPA cruft + bundled addons).
Old README, lightly edited, follows.
Stay safe, kindle hope, & organize.
-Linc, MLK day 2026
Vanilla was born out of the desire to create flexible, customizable, and downright entertaining community solutions. Vanilla has been used to power tens of thousands of community forums around the world and we couldn't be happier if you've decided to use Vanilla to grow yours.
| Forum | Rich Editor | Dashboard |
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Every community is unique. Vanilla is a finely-crafted platform on which designers and developers can build a custom-tailored environment that meets your community's particular needs.
- We've reimagined traditional forums for mass-appeal.
- Our theming flexibility is second-to-none.
- Impossibly good integration options with single sign-ons and embedding.
- The best tools available for community management.
- Curated features with great plugin options, not the kitchen sink.
The current version of Vanilla requires PHP 8.0+ and MySQL 5.7+. The following PHP extensions are also required: cURL, DOM, Fileinfo, GD, intl, JSON, libxml, PDO
Upgrading from an earlier version of Vanilla? See our upgrade notes.
Full-text index support has been disabled by default as of Vanilla 4. To enable full-text index support, add a FullTextIndexing key under the Database section of your site config and set its value to true. Failure to add this config value will result in full-text indexes being removed from Vanilla's database tables.
- Local Development - Environment, Configuration & Debugging & Build Tools.
- Running Unit tests.
Vanilla releases are built using Phing to create a pre-built deploy-ready copies of Vanilla. To build these run the following in the root of the repository.
./bin/release
The following dependencies are all required for building a release.
nodeyarnphpcomposer
Code committed prior to 2026 is copyright 2009-2021 Vanilla Forums Inc. & 2021-2025 Higher Logic Inc. Code committed after that date is copyright its respective authors, including newly-added plugins. Code herein now published under the GNU AGPLv3 (only), as allowed & affirmed by its previous license notice:
Vanilla Forums is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Vanilla Forums is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Vanilla Forums.
If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Per the terms of the GNU AGPLv3, no code herein may be used in a cloud service without publishing ALL related source code regardless of whether they are plugins, customizations, hacks, or any other type of code-level connector or change.
Just kidding, everything's awesome.
