Using Flarum as a base for community site

arek

Hi guys,

I am a founder of a Polish website called Wywrota.pl. The most popular section of the website is a Songbook, with lyrics and chords for people who want to learn how to play guitar. It started as a hobby project and it's still quite popular. I'm pretty sure you have never heard of it, but it has been online for the last 20 years.

We have been using a legacy CMS system written in Perl and recently we took a decision to finally get rid of it and replace it with a modern system written in PHP/Laravel. Instead of starting from scratch we want to base our developments on existing framework and Flarum got our attention, because of your maturity and active community.

We are thinking about extending Flarum by building new extensions or modifying existing ones. I think it makes sense, because the general concept of a community site is very similar to a forum - just a little bit wider. Users post something (an article, a poem, a picture, song lyrics, etc.) and others comment it, rate it etc. For example, our Article or Lyrics could special kinds of Posts (like in Wordpress - everything is a Post).

I would love to hear your opinion on that. Does it sound like a good idea? I can send you more details if you're interested. We are willing to develop our code as open source and release it to the community. I also wonder someone from the community would be interested in helping me with the implementation of providing commercial support.

Best regards,
Arek

Arkinn

arek

Sounds a good idea to me! I think to get some of the functionality you require you'd have to write some extensions but you say your willing to do that, so why not go for it? ?

And releasing them to the community would be awesome of you! I'm sure other users would benefit greatly from it.

arek providing commercial support.

It depends on what kind of support your after, to be honest the forums here, or our discord channel provides great support already. Generally anything you could ever need Flarum wise is answered on either of the platforms.

thephotographyblog

I think Flarum is a great foundation for any website, but would be a little bit weary of the fact that is still in beta. That being said, in my experience the software functions almost as if it were in production. Take this forum for example, there are tons of posts and the site is very stable.

Be sure to let us know how you get on, I'm interested to see more people using Flarum and see how it is going to be integrated.

Alex

Razor

Well, it's beta just in name. It's really stable, there are some bugs, but nothing that will affect user experience. So thumbs up for choosing and using(in near future) flarum.

Prosperous

Regardless of whether a forum is still in beta or not should not be the only thing someone focuses on when making their choice of software.

Using Flarum at the moment is definitely stable, but what I would personally recommend is using the core functionality until stable is released. If you start installing extensions and making too many modifications then you are increasing your chances of errors springing up as the updates and upgrades are released.

I am taking this approach for my own personal instance of Flarum and have not yet had any issues whatsoever, knock on wood. ?

jacob

I hope it is okay to jump in on this conversation, I am keen to use Flarum in production following people's advise to limit use to the core package until Stable is released. I am willing to put up with any user bugs that may occur and report them here, but I would like to know if the security risk and possible loss of content mentioned on the FAQ page is related solely to extension compatibility or if there may still be bugs in the core package?

Bugs could cause a loss of content or expose private information to the internet at large.

Running 0.1.0-beta.7

Thanks