Thought on using Flarum as company intranet discussion forum

jvloo

Hey peeps, what's up? 😄

I have been following Flarum since few years ago (and yes, I stay anonymous with my old account previously) and really fall deeply in love with this elegant software. Without any wonderful idea on how to utilize this beautiful software, I ended up starting a private forum for my uni's club and society. And now, finally I decided to adopt Flarum as my startup company's intranet forum.

So, here's a quick survey:

Anyone of you guys use Flarum privately, as a private internal discussion platform? Show me your hand! 😆
Any nice feature you think should be added to Flarum (via extension) to make it more practical to use as an internal discussion platform?

Just a summary of my idea on Flarum:

I think I might want to start a personal project on developing some useful extensions to turn Flarum into an intranet forum for my company, which I named it Project Workflar for now. If anyone would like to join me in the future when I launch the project, do follow this post for further updates. Cheers~

p.s. I'm a self-taught developer, still a noob. Thanks in advance for any assistance or feedback given by you guys <3

p.s. #2 Sorry for my bad English..

clarkwinkelmann

jvloo Anyone of you guys use Flarum privately, as a private internal discussion platform?

Not intranet, but I used an online private Flarum for a while for a group of people that were beta-testing one product I worked on. There wasn't a lot of activity but it worked fine for our needs.

jvloo Any nice feature you think should be added to Flarum (via extension) to make it more practical to use as an internal discussion platform?

I think the question is more what feature do you need that Flarum doesn't have yet ? If it has everything you need, I'd say it's a good reason to go ahead 😉

jvloo

clarkwinkelmann

Thanks for your reply, Sir. Indeed, the existing features and extensions of Flarum are far more than enough for most sort of usage currently. What I thought on to extend it for working purpose might be those listed below (just an initial thought):

Online pdf reader for file attachment - Sometimes we might attach a guideline or SOP which is written in pdf format. The employees might have the options to choose to download or view it online so that it's more handy for them to refer
Post sharing unique link for each post and reply (like how it works on Stackoverflow) - Could be useful to share some useful information to colleagues on WhatsApp group, easier and fast access to the mentioned post/reply
Save for later - Save post into collection for reading later and set reminder on every login if you wish. Sometimes there might be work in progress (client's issue etc.) needed to be solved in a longer duration. You might forgot to follow up if there's nobody posting new replies in the post (since you could follow the post and receive updates)
Save posts to collection - For convenient access and better post organization to the important information and you don't need to bookmark it in your browser or search the post every time you when you need it in urgent
Add favourite tags at the sidebar - employees could pin tags related to their works for easier access (department-related etc.)
Save post as template - Some posts might have their own format to follow. You don't to reply yourself refering to the standard post or memorising the format.
Post snippet or vocabulary - Auto-completion on typing. Could turn on/off in preference settings. It might be useful if you have certain terminology dedicated for your company, for instances, client's name, facilities, department name, etc.

These extension idea might sound silly or seems not useful to you guys. I'm just trying to see if there's a small group of Flarumites having the same usage as mine...

And just in case somebody might ask me why don't I use other more relevant open source software? My answer is always - I love Flarum 😛

cmcjacob

jvloo I've used it internally as a vendor review / report system. We were previously using a community based "official review" template that had to be manually approved on reputable Discord channels. Once all the tags, groups and guidelines were set it was much easier for new buyers to be aware of scams, etc. We set a tag for each vendor and it's still used today for reviews, I considered expanding it into something greater but the staff/users didn't want more.

One benefit of Flarum in it's infancy stage is it offers a level of abstraction/simplicity that no other forum will give you, coupled with it's extensibility makes it appealing. I'm just a dev, not in marketing or anything like it, but anyone I've shared my Flarumite enthusiasm with has been met with positive feedback because the underlying simplicity and extensions give us a creative flair and choice. This isn't something you will often discover otherwise trying to pick a discussion engine.

It's also clear that everyone has their own vision of it doing great things, and that aspect is just as appealing to a developer as it is your average Joe that wants to use this at work. If it continues this path of staying simple but highly extensible, you'll have a hard time convincing me not to pitch an extended Flarum to any dated community wiling to participate in a beta. It's much easier to add the functionality you want to Flarum's primitive base than it would be to hack it into other forums, but I say this looking at it as a developer and not a regular user. It's partially why I'll soon be publishing a niche theme engine, I am no designer and very curious to see what people come up with. Cool topic btw ! 🤭

luceos

cmcjacob If it continues this path of staying simple but highly extensible, you'll have a hard time convincing me not to pitch an extended Flarum to any dated community.

First off, thanks for the praise! Aside from that, the core principle of Flarum is to have an extremely simplistic core (framework), that's also the reason why all default features of Flarum are extensions. There used to be a saying around here whenever someone asked "can I have feature x":

There is no/an extension for that (yet).

You would have a very hard time convincing me to give up on the extreme flexibility Flarum brings, even though this was discussed in the past by merging some core extensions into Flarum. Dogfeeding extension development by maintaining your own is thé best way to guarantee future simplicity and extensibility in one swipe.

Going back on topic. I heard about the largest German telco using Flarum inside their internal project planning tool as a commenting system (using embed). Having consulted with the assigned developer for a bit, I have no idea where this adventure ended up now.

And, let's not forget. The Flarum team is also using discuss privately too, we keep track of our staff meetings, longer discussions and staff related documentation using just one private (primary) tag.

jvloo

cmcjacob I considered expanding it into something greater but the staff/users didn't want more.

Yes, as a developer, we always try to build something that's far more powerful and impressive. However, if we're working in a team, we ended up having to hear the opinions of other team members (who're not devs) or even our clients before we build or extend something. It's hard to convince myself to follow their advice for not building something that I might want it to be, but sometimes, we must only build something that people want, rather than depending on our passion.

cmcjacob If it continues this path of staying simple but highly extensible, you'll have a hard time convincing me not to pitch an extended Flarum to any dated community wiling to participate in a beta.

Yes, I think that would be great for others who might need something that's more extended than Flarum and don't wish to get their hands dirty (spending time searching for suitable extensions to cater their usage of Flarum for certain purpose). But in my humble opinion, Flarum = simple and highly extensible. That's the only reason I join the Flarum community 😉

cmcjacob Cool topic btw

Millions of thanks to your compliment 😆

cmcjacob

luceos I've never heard it referred to as dogfeeding 🐶 but the idea makes a lot of sense and has admittedly had an impact on some of my own unrelated works. I'm not a huge fan of Mithril but that's my own bias because frontend isn't my favorite thing to work on (React angers me sometimes)
what a hidden gym mithril ended up being .

I see beginners using a Redux boilerplate for their CRUD todo app, while apps like flarum do much more with less 😂
can maybe get away with some older laravel stuff, but Mithril is too young in version to not upgrade?? It could be too soon for users to care yet, but it may need to mature a little as flarum does in the future 😏

jvloo

luceos the core principle of Flarum is to have an extremely simplistic core (framework), that's also the reason why all default features of Flarum are extensions

Strongly agree for no reason 😛 . As mentioned earlier, that's what Flarum made me to choose her.

luceos Going back on topic. I heard about the largest German telco using Flarum inside their internal project planning tool as a commenting system (using embed). Having consulted with the assigned developer for a bit, I have no idea where this adventure ended up now.

It sounds great to me 😃

FBI The only one and what I need is, Flarum support all type of files upload/attachment as the core (not extension). Then, I believe this will be Intranet Must Have forum

You win a +1 from me 😉

FBI

My friend from Telecommunication company using this beautiful platform for their internal private discussion. Its speedy, modern and simple. The choice only two which are Vanilla or Flarum. Then I suggest him to using flarum. Fall in love at first sight.

The only one and what I need is, Flarum support all type of files upload/attachment as the core (not extension). Then, I believe this will be Intranet Must Have forum

And for extranet (global) public access, I care about OpenGraph (Twitter Card/Facebook) features. Thats it..

cmcjacob