Already mentioned in other discussions, but now - after migrating data away from Lithium for almost a day - giffgaff finally made the leap into the Flarum family 🥳
https://community.giffgaff.com
I'm going to promote their community as a showcase, proving that:
- Flarum is highly customizable in terms of UX/design.
- Flarum can be integrated into your own authorization layer, hosting stack and existing feature set, as an example:
- giffgaff allows multiple usernames on one mail address
- giffgaff allows way more variety in usernames than native Flarum
- giffgaff listens to many Flarum core mechanics to reward community activity of its members
- Flarum (and PHP) can scale. Noting that without modification Flarum isn't completely there yet, we will heed advice from the giffgaff community team in advancing our optimizations for performance.
Disclaimer In addition to my open source work, I - with the assistance of extremely talented people - also provide Flarum related services including consultation and development.
Earlier this year I started consulting giffgaff as an unofficial Flarum representative in their search for alternatives to their current platform Lithium (Khoros). We soon concluded that giffgaff - a Scottish word meaning "mutual giving" - would find great satisfaction in open source and in Flarum specifically through its flexibility, modern looks and great performance. Their load tests were even a surprise to me!
I, and several people well known to this community, spend the next months giving our best to solve their worry for a lack of features. Extensions were commissioned by them and released for the wider public, including:
- merge discussions
- ignore users
- new features on byobu
- several improvements to best answer authored by @WiwatSrt
They've also started to contribute back to the Flarum source code itself. And by doing so, honoring the meaning of their company name completely 🤗 .
Their community currently uses the following extensions (that we know of):
- clarkwinkelmann/flarum-ext-circle-groups
- flagrow/analytics
- a fork of passport
- fof/split
- flagrow/upload
- flagrow/impersonate
- flarum/approval
- flarum/emoji
- flarum/flags
- flarum/lock
- flarum/markdown
- flarum/mentions
- flarum/sticky
- flarum/tags
- fof/byobu
- fof/ignore users
- fof/links
- fof/pages
- fof/user-bio
- fof/follow-tags
- fof/merge-discussions
- fof/polls
- fof/profile-image-crop
- fof/reactions
- fof/spamblock
- giffgaff/flarum-spoilers
- giffgaff/flarum-user-manager
- michaelbelgium/discussion-views
- wiwatsrv/best-answer
I'm proud to have played a part in their adoption of Flarum which involves millions of users, discussions and post. Yet all of this wouldn't have been possible without the help of my reliable co-developers 😍 , who stood by me and giffgaff when we needed them, even when my attention was diverged to guarantee the survival of Flarum.
I have faith that this proves to be a fundamental milestone in the history of Flarum and I cannot wait to see what the future brings, especially with the warm and welcoming British giffgaff community as part of our family!
