https://blog.vanillaforums.com/news/why-vanilla-no-nested-comments
Nested Comments
Also known as "threaded" comments. Some sites will let you indent replies ad infinitum. In other cases some will allow only a single level of indentation.
I think I meant "nested comments".
To be somewhat fair, I might say the standoffish thing you smelt was really a way to chase some really scary people on there who like to ask questions without first searching the 1000 results.
I have not asked a single question there yet, and I have come a long way in Vanilla.
Once you understand the structure, then you'd be flying like a happy squirrel.
1. Altering the bulk layout is quite easy - use smarty.
And SASS can @extend all them classes quite easily. Enables you to base your site on Bootstrap or Foundation 6 etc.
site/themes/yourtheme/views/default.master.tpl
2. And then with bare CSS and JS you can alter and move around most things.
3. To do the alterations serverside, well, you can override most->all
functions that spit out those little bitty html
site/plugins/yourtheme/class.yourtheme.plugin.php
4. Keep all your modules here, MODX equivalent is snippets. You can later call this in smarty using
{module name="myListofHotStuff"}
site/plugins/yourtheme/modules/class.yourETCcategorymodules.php
5. and lastly, to change all the lingo around the site just copy a standard local.php to
site/conf/locale.php
$Definition['Howdy, Stranger!'] = 'Hello Friend, long time no see!'; //takes html
Vanilla scales very very well. And does not bug down ya MODX, think many resources/slow db/tv/cache hell