Vanilla (Open Source Forums) Funding Announcement

techcrunch.com

18 points·andrewhyde··7 comments

Vanilla is one of the companies that drove Brad Feld to push for a startup visa. They're Canadians, would love to set up in the US, have investors, but are blocked from doing so by the immigration system. There's a WSJ piece that talks to Mark O'Sullivan about his situation if you want more:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126282269345218789.html?mod=...

I'm happy for them. I've thoroughly enjoyed using Vanilla for community based sites I've run. They get usability more than the mainstream PHP forums.

Why don't they have a link on their homepage to their own forum?

Any HN'er want to link to their Vanilla Forum here?

I wonder if Automattic would ever buy them. When you think about it, all of those people with blogs need forums.

Automattic have bbPress.

http://bbpress.org/

Why does it seem all forums are PHP based? Is "making a forum" the Hello World of PHP?

Are there even any good non-PHP forums?

Forums are PHP-based because everyone supports PHP deployment. Most people who are going to run forum software don't have a lot of money for sophisticated setups, or even a simple VPS, so you're generally stuck with whatever your shared host provides. Very few shared hosts provide support for anything besides PHP.

PHP, for all of its troubles, is still the easiest, cheapest, and fastest to deploy, and for that reason will keep a strong foothold until something matches or beats it in that area.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com