Maintained Extensions

pstevens

I'm new to Flarum, but I just wanted to note, that I really like this app "mostly", however, I find the lack of maintained extensions to be disheartening. Why doesn't Flarum maintain a server for official extensions by users and keep the codebase up to date? A lot of these don't even install anymore. This makes the entire project seem abandoned, because, while I do enjoy minimalism... Every site / app / situation might need some extra features. So without having usable extensions, this seems like a waste of time for me and likely others.

So far, I've installed a lot of extensions in the Extensions list and very very few of them actually work. Is there any idea for how long before these will be supported / working again? If it's not soon, I may abandon this for another solution.

Franz

pstevens The short answer is "We're in beta", so we're currently still breaking compatibility with extensions between releases (sometimes, not always). We're doing that, though, to figure out interfaces that we feel are solid enough so that we can support them and extensions can rely on them. The newly released beta.8 was a major step in that direction. We're now finishing what we started in that release, so that we can release a stable version finally.

P.S.: Welcome and thanks for voicing your concerns! 👍️

jordanjay29

pstevens I'm new to Flarum,

Welcome to Flarum!

Please understand that you've joined at a transition time. We just released Beta 8 (and 8.1), which has been in development for a while and was planned to break extensions. This was done so Flarum could provide a more consistent and robust extension API moving forward. But it means a lot of pain now, as you seem to have discovered.

pstevens Why doesn't Flarum maintain a server for official extensions by users and keep the codebase up to date? A lot of these don't even install anymore.

While Flarum doesn't have an official marketplace, one of our core devs maintains a popular website that does this: Flagrow.io

If you want to see what extensions are compatible with the latest version, you can search Flagrow.io or check out this page to see.

As for updating and maintaining extensions, I urge you to be patient. Some extension developers (including myself) simply have not had the time or energy yet to update their extensions. Some are in the process of updating them (and often are providing progress statements on their extension discussions) . And some have been taken up by a group called Friends of Flarum who intend to maintain old extensions abandoned by their creators.

I hope this helps you understand and have a better experience. Welcome to Flarum!

terabytesoftw

I'm also new to FLARUM, I've migrated from vanilla forums, and we're happy, the extensions I've needed all work, I'll name some of them that can help you in your forum:

Discussion Views.
Flagrow Split.
FOF Spamblock.
Reflar Doorman.
Reflar Level Ranks.
Reflar Reactions.
Reflar Stop Forum Spam.
Flagrow/Upload.

Vanilla being stable the development of extensions is very poor, and most of them are outdated.

I thank the Flarum team, Reflar, Flagrow, FOF, for their great effort to give us an excellent forum, which we can assemble according to our needs.

Thks,