1) Start with Lincoln's Hard Fork
2) Security patch Chocolate Forums for newest PHP 8.5
3) An improved forum Installer.
4) An improved forum Updater
5) Add Redis/Memcached support
6) UI improvements like thread views and rich text editor.
7) AI & AutomationModel Context Protocol (MCP): Connects external AI tools (like Claude or ChatGPT) to read and perform tasks inside the community. Automated Workflows: Triggers automated moderation rules, & demographic segmentation.
8) AI Simulated Member programed to make 3 new posts/week by searching the internet & to interact naturally by answering questions members post.
9) Visual Layouts: Introduced drag-and-drop layout editors for customized, mobile-responsive community pages without custom code.
10) Federated Search: Enabled cross-platform search capabilities to pull content from external tools like Zendesk into the main community search.
11) Third-Party Integrations: Added deep synchronization capabilities with enterprise tools, including Salesforce Activity Sync and automated Productboard feedback routing.

We believe Vanilla Forums is the best Forum software with a bright future. Some of the largest forums in the world use Vanilla Forums. Simply post a comment below with your expertise to volunteer to assist.

Ramesh Narayanan has been customizing Vanilla Forums for over 5 years:
Ramesh(at)exoboosters.tech
Now Ramesh is launching Chocolate Forums, a fork to continue work on Vanilla Forums. In January, '25, HigherLogic.com stopped supporting the free version of Vanilla Forums and removed the repository of the free version of Vanilla from GitHub. Fortunately a former Dev, Lincoln saved the repository & posted it for Download. Lincoln also patched Free Vanilla to be compatible with PHP 8 here: https://github.com/prosembler/vanilla

Let's start with Lincoln's Repository and take the new "Chocolate Forums" into 2027