Vanilla Is a Tasty Discussion Forum CMS

Discussion forums may seem antiquated in a world of 140-character conversations but they're still a vital part of online group communication. If you want to add a place for your Web site visitors to meet and chat, then have a look at the open source discussion forum CMS, Vanilla.

Vanilla has a load of administration features that make managing an online forum a snap, including the ability to change the layout, style, themes, and even change the language of the forum in a few simple steps. It's got built-in spam control and advanced search capabilities that allow you to drill down into forum content via comments, username, or discussion topic.

Several hundred add-ons are available to help customize Vanilla to your liking. Report Comment lets users report comments for moderation, Twitter Feed allows users to display their last five Tweets on their profile page, and TagThis adds tagging capabilities to discussions. Developers are, of course, encouraged to create new add-ons or join the community to help develop the Vanilla project.

Licensed under the GPLv2, Vanilla works on all the major Web browsers and runs on virtually any Web server with more recent versions of PHP and MySQL.