Footure Proof? Most Definitely.
To allow developers to extend Vanilla's core settings and behaviour beyond the (already comprehensive) default set, we've come up with the FooBank™ system - a method to define custom variables, each containing any type of data (the actual database variable name is of the varchar type and the value is of the longtext type, potentially allowing very large strings).
Using FooBank
Consider the following scenario: I want my Vanilla website to feature a series of special sidebars which display RSS feeds from a variety of different sites. I could add the URLs as new FooBank objects (e.g., $config_bbc_news_rss) and then reference these when adding my sidebars (which can contain a mixture of PHP, JavaScript and HTML code). I could even add the whole RSS parsing script as a FooBank object and call that within my pages at runtime.
View the FooBank Documentation for further help and some basic examples.
Guerilla Vanilla!
FooBank can contain any type of string data, including HTML mark-up, URLs, PHP code or any snippet you wish to store as procedural type data. Another example might be storing a series of custom MySQL statements - you can begin to see the true potential of such a flexible system. Using this method you could effectively create whole 'guerilla' applications stored as a series of custom functions, modules and variables. Learn how.
What Does 'Foo' Mean?
You can read more about the origin of the word itself on Wikipedia.