Potential Flarum user with a few questions

danvsn

Hello,

I was considering building a small online community for one of my Uni's branches and I test some modern forum software, including Flarum. Now, I have a few questions for the Flarum power-users, if they're willing to give me some hints.

What are Flarum's min. requirements for decent performance? in terms of RAM and Space, since I was considering hosting it on Digital Ocean. A few days ago I tested Discourse, which is a resource eater (min 2gb of ram, or 1GB + swap) even for small communities, adding the fact that installing it without docker is difficult, and Docker tends to keep previous images, thus eating space and adding the need of periodically cleaning it.

Is there an intention of adding a text formatting bar to the new message panel? one aspect of that community would be to add iframes to google drive folders and previews for code snippets, which I haven't tested yet if it's possible with the current format of the message panel. Anyway, a formatting bar would be nice.

How easily editable is the theme scheme? I like the original design, but making a few changes would serve well - like, instead of "start a discoussion" I would like to rename it to "add a project/topic" since the whole point of this community would be to ask questions about stuff from our assignments and collaborative projects, as well as iframing google drive/box/onedrive/dropbox folders with files (that would be the projects) like matlab functions, python scripts etc.

Thank you!

Kulga

danvsn What are Flarum's min. requirements for decent performance?

I pulled some graphs after running a service to have 50VU's go at it for 5min. It loaded some css files, home page and a thread with like 10 posts in a plus a image.

Notice the blue arrow in the second image, it's aligned with the load test.

Kakifrucht

The requirements are very moderate and much lower than Discourses. It has a very light frontend and the backend is nicely optimized too. Small Digitalocean (10$) should certainly suffice.

There is not much you can do already regarding adding special features to posts. There is a media embed extension on this forum already, which is great for certain sites, but obviously not everything is supported. To format your post, you can use Markdown or BBCode right now.

The theme is currently modifiable via custom CSS rules or by adding a dedicated extension. To edit the language, you could copy the given english extension and change strings as you wish.

danvsn

Kakifrucht so adding iframe code from the aforemedntioned personal cloud services is not possible?

Kakifrucht

danvsn There is this extension, which seems to support direct embedding of google drive. You would just have to paste the link.

danvsn

Kakifrucht it's great, but it limits the majority of the users since little use google drive. my university has signed a partnership with Microsoft, so all the students got free Office 365 and 1TB of OneDrive which apparently they all use. I guess I'll go with Flarum and ask them to paste the public link.