langreiter.com plain, simple: vanilla-documentation

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vanilla-documentation

CREATED BY traumwind • LAST EDITED BY chris 7989 days AGO

Documentation for Vanilla is a pretty scarce resource. But, if anybody is serious, reading the source code should help a lot. It's weighs in at only a few kbytes and, for an experienced web programmer, it should be very easy to understand it completely.

Hi to all the visitors coming from Jason's fine hypertext-o-rama! If you're interested in Vanilla and happen to use Windows, I'd suggest taking it on a spin by downloading the easy-to-install VanillaSBX variant. Using Vanilla certainly beats reading about Vanilla ...

Then you'll also see that (while it certainly isn't yet as user-friendly as it could and should be) Vanilla is very much a tool for writers — for efficient writers and especially writers who can handle full flexibility at the expense of giving up some hand-holding other systems masterly provide.

As said above, documentation is scarce, but help is available in strong doses. You can send me mail or (preferred and more likely to generate useful answers anyway) join our mailing list.

Some unavoidable vocabulary: Vanilla "spaces" are composed of "snips", which are, essentially, pages. Dynasnips are small programs that can be embedded in snips — the weblog component ("du-jour") is nothing but such a small program, for example. You can easily link to a snip from within another by simply enclosing the target snip's name in stars, e.g. writing *Vanilla* will result in Vanilla. It may seem a bit weird at first, but after a while you'll come to appreciate the simplicity of the scheme. Links to outside sites work the same way — *http://www.kottke.org* will give you www.kottke.org. Of course, you can also use any HTML tags you've come to appreciate in the past few years. Hey, that's actually all you need to get started!

Finally, if you want to see what Vanilla sites can look or feel like, try ...
www.freememes.com, earl.strain.at, www.vector5.de, www.lazyatom.com, www.h-lame.com, www.rinner.st ...