1.8 Vanilla Server

What exactly does a vanilla server entail?
Is it going to be our new map? or is it just a place to play around until everything is up?
What happened to all of our stuff on the 1.7.3 map? Is it gone until we get our plugins? or is there some way to get there from the vanilla map?
That's all the questions I can think of right now, feel free to answer, or post you own questions.

The vanilla map is just a really basic map with no plugins or other features. It is temporary until the plugins are updated to 1.8 (or even 1.9 at this rate)

Unfortunatley I don't think there's a way to retrieve your items from the old map and your buildings are most likely gone too (unless Jon is willing to copy and paste them all over from the old map to the new one but that would be a huge effort).

our vanilla server is basically a server that runs with no additional plugin, like no tp commands, no kits,no towny and stuff like that.
In the case of this map i dont think its goin to be our new map, probly just a place to mess around.
Jon still has the old map file of the 1.7.3 map that will be loaded up wen we get an official release of all the plugins and bukkit builds, probably run a type of muti verse with a stargate between both worlds. that way we can transfer items and possibly do some copy pasteing of peoples builds that they want to bring.
i dont believe jon can have both the vanilla map and old 1.7.3 map up at the same time it would take up massive amounts of memeory.

hope that covered it all ...... thnx for the questions

Thanks for answering my questions.
I already did know about the stargate to the 1.7.3 map and the copy/pasting buildings, I just wasn't sure if that was going to happen now or later.

To elaborate on what gambit said this map is not our new map, this is confirmed. The reason its just a vanilla temp map for now is that Notch in 1.8 didn't add all of the Biomes that he wanted in the game and in 1.9 he added new biomes and a few changes to other things like strongholds, so to make a perm map with 1.8 wouldn't make sense because we would miss out on the new changes in 1.9, although we might have this map I believe it's only going to be semi-vanilla as in we may get a few basic plugins on it but nothing game changing like heroes or citizens and so on.