This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Vanilla Forums

Description

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.

Installation

  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

FAQ

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/

Reviews

December 3, 2019
Works fine with WordPress 5.2.4 and Vanilla 2.8.1. Likely works with upgraded versions of both. Any comments about it not working, either have other problems going on, outdated versions of software, or incorrect configuration. Read the install instructions and enjoy easy SSO with this plugin. Developers, thank you for updating this!
October 10, 2018
This plugin does not change with wordpress changes or Vanilla app changes. There are bugs in the current version having to do with SSO and role propagation and the company has taken the position they don't support SSO for the open source community. We are moving to Discourse. 'edit: 10102018' I'm adding back a star to my review. It's true most of what I said, but I figured out the Role Propagation issue after months of looking for an answer. Adding back a star. Would be nice if Vanilla cared about us plug-in users though.
July 8, 2018
I've tested about every method of integrating a forum into Wordpress websites. I've used plugin forums, standalone forums as separate sites, and standalone forums in iFrames. So far it looks like Vanilla might be the best solution, the easiest and best-integrated. So why four-stars instead of five? You can add sub-forums to forums, but you cannot group forums into true categories in the same way that mainstream forum software does. There is a Vanilla plugin to address this but the plugin is many years old, has reported bugs, and was never released as a stable version.
January 18, 2018
We've managed to make it work for SSO based authorization on a VF forum (with users logging in/registering via a WP site), but had a lot of troubles with bad UI, unexpected errors, not really decent documentation.
September 3, 2016
This plugin allows you to have people register on your blog and takes that same information to register them also on your vanilla forums. It's automatic for them. I am using the free open source version of vanilla forums and this set up with some reading and common sense. Nobody has tried to sell me anything and the plugin works as intended with the open source version of Vanilla. You will also need the JSConnect plugin from Vanilla forums Plugin page for single sign on. Setting this up is pretty self explanatory. A great plugin.
Read all 17 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Vanilla Forums” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

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Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.