Opalstack Community Forum

opalsean

Hi all, first post here 👶

My shared hosting company is using Flarum for our user community forum: Opalstack Community Forum

It's running the default set of extensions, plus RSS and FoF Split and a bit of custom CSS. I'd love to hear any feedback you might have 😀

This is the second support forum that I've managed. The first was running OSQA, and while it was a successful forum, it was a bear to setup and maintain. With Flarum, I was up and running in minutes, and was able to nail down the look and feel within a couple of hours. It was so simple that we're thinking of making a one-click install for Flarum so that our hosting customers will have it even easier than I did 🙂

Many thanks to the Flarum team for making a wonderful piece of software!

askvortsov

opalsean I'm planning on improving one click install comparability later today (optimized for shared hosting without ability to set document root). Ideally, it wouldnt require use of composer on the shared hosting sites at all. So far I'm feeling pretty confident about most of it, except for allowing users to install/remove extensions post initial install (that might need composer for now at least). Is that something you were planning on supporting in yours?

[deleted]

Nice site! Can you share CSS font tweaks?

opalsean

[deleted] the custom CSS I'm using is - there aren't any font tweaks really, the logo is an image.

tankerkiller125

Very nice site, if you do build a one-click install I'd be curios as to what you did/how you pulled it off.

opalsean

tankerkiller125 if we do it it will work like this very general example:

User provides an app name (and maybe some configurable parameters that we put in the UI) and clicks the install button.
Control panel hands that info off to the web server.
The web server passes the info to an installation script that runs to install Flarum.
The script will create the database, install composer, install Flarum, and do the initial setup in config.php.

askvortsov Our bespoke control panel (and its accompanying API) can install any type of web application, running whatever commands are needed to install whatever needs to be installed. Setting the document root won't be an issue for us, and we can easily have it so the user can still use composer to install extensions etc. Our live forum is actually running this way right now (ie, running as a user-space install on our system) albeit I set it up manually.

That said, it's great that you're interested in making Flarum more friendly for shared hosting! I'll be sure to let you know if I notice any particular pain points on our end. I don't expect too many though, as our shared hosting platform is a bit more flexible than your average cPanel host 🙂

edit: sorry if that started to sound like an advertisement, that was not my intention

askvortsov

opalsean
Sounds like a really sweet setup!

For more basic shared hosting, I made this: https://github.com/askvortsov1/flarum-ez-install, which handles the composer install for core, bundled extensions, and bazaar on github, and provides a zip that shared hosting users can easily unpack. It also takes care of installing/updating skeleton, and is essentially a Proof of Concept for one possibly strategy of making flarum shared hosting friendly. It works every time I've tested it, but I'd need to do more rigorous investigation before promoting it as something for the community to use.

luceos

opalsean that's a great forum, thanks for sharing. Please note you can use the ssh based php flarum install command using yaml or json as well.

I've been responsible for a webhosting CP for years and would be honored to see our first actual control panel integration become reality! Back then we used a custom php app with perl agents on the servers; extremely reliable but also very outdated 🙊

Good luck with your release, when are you scheduled to go public with opalstack?

opalsean

askvortsov For more basic shared hosting, I made this..

Sweet, I'll be sure to keep an eye on it and will share our own installer code when/if we build it 🙂

luceos Good luck with your release, when are you scheduled to go public with opalstack?

Thanks! We hope to open up the beta within the next couple of months, but anyone is free to join now via the invitation registration form at the bottom of our main homepage.