Friends of Flarum, the collaboration for maintained extensions

Started September last year and already responsible for 33 repositories on GitHub! That's over 30 extensions !

We've come a long way, with us moving over most Flagrow extensions and the community requesting the upgrade of quite some abandoned extensions, we are very confident of our success. Now that we do, we'd like to step up. A custom logo is underway, we're considering a simplistic website and we're pondering about our perspectives of the future. That's also the reason we set up a dedicated discord server and our own Open Collective.

The Open Collective in our scheme is an important factor. The more backers we have, the faster we're able to upgrade our own and other extensions, as well as fix bugs and develop new features! Therefor, please consider backing the Flarum extension maintenance team.

Almost a year in, with 36 extensions and over 36,000 downloads

While our original intent was simply to maintain & revive old extensions, we've already created 13 original extensions.

We do have a simplistic website (the design of which I stole from the ReFlar website ) which loads our extensions directly from Packagist and orders them by downloads. You can see it in action @ https://friendsofflarum.org.

You may have noticed that there haven't been as many extensions recently, and that is partially because of a lack of commissioned work. We don't always have the time to be developing extensions, specially as many of us are part of the Flarum team itself (do remember that Friends of Flarum is not an official extension group) and have other commitments to family, work, etc.

To help us out, please feel free to donate to both, if possible, Flarum and Friends of Flarum. Flarum is powerful because of third party extensions.

Sorry, I can't write a really inspiring piece of literature like luceos .

datitisev Sorry, I can't write a really inspiring piece of literature like luceos

Being factual and to the point is a skill too

As an addition. Any developer can join us to help maintain the extensions in our library.

datitisev Almost a year in, with 36 extensions and over 36,000 downloads

Two years' celebrations are closing in with 63 (woooooow) extensions on the list

luceos And these extensions increase in functionality and quality with every release. I want to personally thank everyone who contributes to this amazing ecosystem.

[deleted] Seconded.

Have to say this is a phenomenal initiative. Coming from other software... dead extensions is an ongoing problem causing all sorts of issues, from preventing updates, security issues to general quality control issues. I'm glad FoF exists to combat this problem. What is the best way to support FoF?

As beta 14 just came out, our extensions will be all hopefully updated soon.

Some updates had already been tagged, as some of you had noticed. Those are the ones I coded & tested locally myself.
Others have PRs from @askvortsov that will be merged & tagged soon.

We'll try our best to get them all updated as soon as possible. We have over 60 extensions, and not many developers or active maintainers, so that might take a while - but our goal is to have them all updated as that is the purpose of this group.

Thank you for your patience.

peopleinside I don't agree and I'm deluded by that but ok, maybe it's me that are not understanding.
I cannot upgrade to the new Flarum version because of extension.

There's absolutely no need to upgrade to beta 14 immediately. This release is huge and will require some time and effort of community extension developers to get their extensions patched. That's the way things work. Especially with Friends of Flarum where the majority of the members are also responsible for the latest Flarum release.

peopleinside Flarum doesn't have security in the core so I need have extension: captcha, stopforumspam, etc that I cannot avoid to have.

Then wait for them to be patched.

peopleinside I cannot monitor, be notified when a new extension is released because there is no such check and feature inside extension manager on Flarum so I was opening an issue where issue are present and I'm not asking every hours or minute to implement compatibility, just alerting as I think is normal.

Opening issues on all repositories of FoF extensions that aren't compatible by every user would cause unnecessary activity on 60 repositories. Time that could be invested in actually making those extensions compatible. Lovely that it's a great way for you to keep track of unpatched extensions, but issues are meant to help the maintainers do their work as efficient as possible.

If you want to keep track of releases, there are two channels:

1. following the discussion here on discuss (you can actually click that button under "reply" to "follow" a discussion and get notified through email.
2. using coderelease.io which also sends an email.

peopleinside I don't think closing issue when issue are not resolved his good

Try to see it from our side as I explained above, being overladen with unnecessary notifications isn't helpful. It's also not nice to be downvoted or criticized for trying to protect the small team of active maintainers FoF has, hardworking people that give so much without asking anything in return..

luceos Opening issues on all repositories of FoF extensions that aren't compatible by every user would cause unnecessary activity on 60 repositories.

Closing unfixed issue is asking for exactly this. If I find that extensions X does not work with new version of Flarum, I would open an issue for this (unless there is already existing opened issue), because this is standard "report bug" behavior. If you just close this issue, someone will do this again and open another issue (because bug is still not fixed), so I'm not sure how closing unfixed issues will make anything better.

rob006 opening issues on extensions that aren't patched one day after a flarum release isn't helpful. We are fully aware that extensions aren't compatible yet. The issues opened were used to get notified of a new compatible release. The best way to get that notification is not the issue, but discuss or coderelease.io.

luceos as I told in other post I love Flarum and want also love the team.
I understand your point of view about many extensions to update, etc but please try also to understand seing issues closed without a solution is not good.

I'm happy to read the update can wait but try also to understand that is not easy monitor when "we" will be able to update.
Was not nice the experience of seeing my issue closed and read my behaviour can be not civil about just reporting and monitor an issue.

I will try to understand you and of curse I will see here on Flarum and on GitHub, just was not nice to see issues closed and to read the motivation. Just that.

After that still want to be your community friend, with you and with all Flarum team.
I'm happy to see someone can be with me in my opinion.

Thanks again

luceos opening issues on extensions that aren't patched one day after a flarum release isn't helpful

It may not be helpful for you, but it is helpful for others. Public bugtracker is tool not only for maintainers, but also for users and community. I understand that you may feel pressure and there is a lot of work related to new beta release, but closing unfixed issues and expecting that people will magically gues that talking about compatibility with new release is forbidden, is not a right way for dealing with this pressure. Opened issue may stay open for months and it does not generate any notifications on its own (unlike closing it, which will will generate 1-2 notifications ).

rob006 I agree, this is my point of view

rob006 Public bugtracker is tool not only for maintainers, but also for users and community.

I disagree. But nonetheless I think I overreacted in closing those issues peopleinside . My apologies for my rude response.

luceos Thanks.
We are users that are having issues on upgrading Flarum, the issue is caused by extension.

Check, create an issue allow us to monitor the progression of this issue. I collaborate with different open source project and never get, usually, issue closed without a solution.

Maybe from develop side your point of view can be agree, I can understand but I feel right user "open an issue like a ticket" to follow the progression and to be informed when issue is resolved.

Happy work and day also. an hug from here.