Good Vanilla Forms Resources?

[josiahsprague]

I know there are already a lot of discussions about this here, and I’ve read all of them. I absolutely love CSS Tricks’ integration of WordPress and Vanilla forums. I suppose the best way to learn how that is done is just to take a look at how Chris and Trademark did it here, which I plan to do. But I wonder if anyone can recommend some of the following;

* A good responsive starter theme for Vanilla
* A good list of tried and true plugins and/or approaches for integrating WP/Vanilla

I tried asking this on the Vanilla website, but the discussion was a little negative and shooting down the idea that the two could be integrated, or that Vanilla should be responsive.

[josiahsprague]

Chris, I’d also like to know how you integrated the search to work between the two and whether or not you’re using a WordPress plugin to embed Vanilla or how you’re combining the two on the front end. All I see here is HTML that contains references to both.

[chrisburton]

@chriscoyier (tagging you to answer this question)

Personally, I think this forum will ultimately end up going to BBPress or at least I hope so. Why not go with that which might be much easier to integrate?

[Chris Coyier]

I haven’t *actually* used bbPress yet, so it’s a little hard for me to straight up recommend, but it’s very likely that would be a better way to go. I’m in the early stages of thinking of getting these forums converted to that. I don’t like the Vanilla forums theming at all and there is no integration between these forums and the rest of the site. The search is just a google search engine.

[josiahsprague]

@chriscoyier Wow, I didn’t realize that. Your work looks so seamless on the front end that I just assumed you had figured out some intuitive ways to integrate it on the back end.

Is the header, footer, navigation, etc coming from a WP query, or did you manually copy that markup into the Vanilla theme?

I’m brainstorming for a website that includes a blog and a forum, and I want everything to be as seamless as possible. It seemed to me that bbPress was generally considered sub-par, and that Vanilla was taking the lead. Maybe I should revisit bbPress.

I also liked the concept of Discourse at first glance, but then I realized that it doesn’t (yet) support theming and is actually a somewhat immature platform. Maybe that will mature in the next couple of years, though after looking closely at the architecture of the demos, I don’t have high hopes for it.

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