Residential Forum & Info Source

ctx

First and foremost, My sincere thanks to the Flarum team for all their hard work!

I will be soft launching my first Flarum forum next week and thought I would share it's link here. I also thought I'd share some high level points from the implementation journey. This forum is intended to support a residential community, in an effort to get information out to those who do not use email notifications from the community association. Surfing good, eMail bad, I guess!

The implementation is pretty vanilla, with the exception of javascript and LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) on the back end. LAMP drives the custom header, which updates time & weather about every 30 seconds (people love knowing the weather here). Weather data is aggregated from my PHP library queries via the IBM Weather Underground API.

Click here, then click through to the Forum (the big square keyboard icon).

High Level Implementation Points

Release 0.1.0-beta.9 - BETA. Do not use in production (sorry, I'm going to anyway since it's been pretty stable) 😆
Note about the #Customizing Paths documentation to self; you can't implement that after the forum has been installed/initialized (in other words, you can't seem to move things around once install is complete?).
Have a cron job to run tar backups and mysqldumps every hour during implementation. This saved me once.
Google Search kept flagging the forum with "Soft 404's" while using the SEO plugin. Oddly enough, after a Flarum reload and MySQL import, Google Search was then happy. I blame Google for their lack of diagnosis tools.
Wrote bash shell scripts to load the core Flarum engine and my set of "tested" plugins. Makes it easy to spin up development instances for testing.
Evidentially the main Packagist repository has been grumpy lately (lots of 404's when trying to load plugins). Switched to a mirror in JP and all those problems went away. Thought I would pass that along in case anyone else out there was having the same issue.
I hacked the New User Signup PHP code a bit to add email notification to admin when someone new joins the forum. I could not find a plug-in that adds that feature?
Someone smarter than me should implement private messaging.
Pretty. Darn. Impressed... with Flarum.

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ctx Someone smarter than me should implement private messaging.

There is someone working on that.

This is a perfect way to use Flarum; a neighborhood announcement and discussion forum. Very, very nice.

luceos

ctx I hacked the New User Signup PHP code a bit to add email notification to admin when someone new joins the forum. I could not find a plug-in that adds that feature?

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/6460-flagrow-subscribed-additional-event-subscriptions/17

ctx Note about the #Customizing Paths documentation to self; you can't implement that after the forum has been installed/initialized (in other words, you can't seem to move things around once install is complete?).

This should be no issue at all.

ctx Have a cron job to run tar backups and mysqldumps every hour during implementation. This saved me once.

Using git should be enough and keeps local and production identical. Everything you can set with the admin settings like custom less can also be forced in a local extender.

ctx Pretty. Darn. Impressed... with Flarum

👏👍🤘

ctx

cmcjacob Maybe you could add a lot more tags that further categorize different events (I noticed you just use "Community" a lot)

Thanks for the great feedback and suggestions. Yes, the tags do need sorted out. I asked an associate to "go to town" and post community things and she did exactly what I asked (to the letter). 😆

Thanks for visiting and helping me put some load on the server.

ctx

luceos https://discuss.flarum.org/d/6460-flagrow-subscribed-additional-event-subscriptions/17

Too many late nights and I totally missed fof/subscribed! Thank you so much @luceos for pointing that out! I moved the core PHP back into place (that I changed) and now all is golden. I'll add fof/subscribed to my standard build shell scripts. :

Once I get this little project going, I'm going to upgrade my dev instance with your latest beta release! Thanks again!