So, you’re here because you want to get a snapshot of what your community implementation process would look like with Vanilla Forums. Completely understandable, and you’ve come to the right place; this blog will provide you with an overview of what your journey with us would be like.

We get it—looking to procure any new system, program or tool is a big step to take for any organization. It requires commitment, dedication and resources. And it’s really difficult to take the first step without really knowing what you’re stepping into...and why should you?

The newness of social media makes us sometimes forget that email is a strong channel to communicate with your customers, fans and enthusiasts. Email is also a great way to keep a community in the minds of your members — think of how much email you get from Twitter, Facebook and especially LinkedIn. A whole lot!

You can also use the power of email to be just as effective. Communicating with your audience can be a piece of cake if you know how to create an effective newsletter that they'll actually want to read.

Here are three quick tips to get you started.

Sometimes within a company you have these really great examples of how people are using your product, and somehow you only share it amongst yourselves. Sales people know the examples to share with prospects and our SuccessTeam™ who helped extend Vanilla certainly know them as well. However, somewhere along the line, we forget to show people publicly how our customers extend our platform. Well guess what?! Today we change that by sharing 5 customers extending the Vanilla platform. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but a nice way to get your own creativity going.

When Vanilla Forums was created, one the core ideas was that you would get a small, lightweight forum that you could then build upon. While customizing the look and feel of Vanilla has always been one of the hallmarks of our platform, we wanted to offer even a better solution for designers who wanted to get their hands dirty while future proofing their design.

Recently I sat down with Isis Graziatto, our lead theme developer, who has spearheaded a new project to make it even easier to create beautiful, functional and responsive looking forums. The result is a new theme called Boilerplate. It’s a new way for our team to allow people to take their designs even further, while allowing us to have a bit more control as we release new features.

We recently did a release which included some very nifty features, like our new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, and an exciting change for those of you using groups. Yes that’s right SECRET GROUPS ARE HERE! Before we delve into the details, let us do a quick review of the Group feature for those who don’t know about it.