One year running a community under Flarum

Zeokat

My community (built with Flarum) is still active and fulfills one year online. As it has been more than a year since I came into contact with Flarum, I would like to expose some features or details that are still not present and that I think it is time to start worrying about them.

Of course, this is part of my experience as a Webmaster, which has been managing web pages for more than 10 years (but not as a developer). I know Flarum developers are busy working on Flarum's core, but why not add these key pieces or at least situate them somewhere along the roadmap.

I insist that these are my wishes for Flarum as Webmaster, not as a developer.

SEO.

As a webmaster, this part is critical. Currently there are some plugins floating arround, but nothing that offers a proper solution. I can not understand how any developer has been involved in offering any kind of solution to improve Flarum's SEO (free or paid).

SEO is one of the most valuable pieces of a webpage. As example you have WordPress plugins related to SEO, they are the most downloaded and the most successfull plugins. I can not understand how this has not caught the attention of any developer and I do not mean Toby or Franz, but developers of extensions.

Extension to manage BBCODES.

I know that this feature is present on most of forum software and into flarum we have to code to manage BBCODES. This piece of the software should be user friendly and not developer friendly.

I think this part reflects a little what is Flarum, a software friendly to the developer but not the user.

To finish...

The list of improvements and ideas is much longer, but I do not want to look like someone who reproaches, but someone who shares their experience and defines what they think is missing.

Thanks anyway for this FREE software ?

MikeJones

Totally agree with BBCODES, as for SEO once I installed the sitemap plugin and submitted it to Google, I am slowly growing in the number of times I show up in search results. My numbers aren't huge, but my flarum is pretty new and I am content with the steady increase:

Ralkage

You are looking for what exists in other further developed forum platforms such as Vbulletin and Xenforo. Sooner if not later a bright developer will solve these great tasks and wants.

In the case of BBCode Management, I do agree that there should be something added in the future as a packaged extension with Flarum to add, modify, and remove custom BBCode's from the Administrative Panel.

As far as SEO goes, all it really takes is to find someone to at least piece SEO together for a developer who only knows programming logic and to help said developer or work together to create a proper extension for everyone's SEO needs. It's doable, we just need to find how to piece it all together into a working product.

Flarum is still young for such a small development team working on the core application itself. What we really need is developers working to fix the current open issues so that the core developers have fewer issues to worry about and just keep their focus on core related issues and development.

Furthermore, I have come to the realization that the majority of this community who aren't active developers spend more time complaining or ranting how said feature is missing and how said person or persons should make it part of the core application. Now, this is not a personal attack on you but rather me just being blunt and saying that it makes me rather mixed with my emotions and why I am really selective with what discussions I view in this community let alone those that I actually want to reply to because it peeks my interest.

I would rather hear more development logs/stories as well as discussions brainstorming new extensions as a community than to constantly hear what "features" are missing and should be added or why the next beta hasn't been released.

This is FOSS project and not a proprietary one, it should and has not been treated like one thus far and I want us to all have fun developing on this platform together as a community ?