Right now I'm having some problems with the current dashboard I'd like to address here, two of the three issues I'll be addressing will have to do with the design of the graph.

First of all, the graph has 2 lines, one of them is nearly invisible for me on dark mode.

The second problem with the graph is that it'll always hover over the line with the biggest number, even if that one is the line from previous week, therefore also displaying weird results. For example you can see that it points to the line from previous week but that the number is the one from this week.

Now the third problem I have with the dashboard is that there is no way to check for outdated extensions, this would be a pretty good feature in order to help keep the extensions up to date, which is pretty hard to do now.

I hope this feedback will help Flarum grow into a better piece of software and that I've explained my problems well enough 🙂

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    • Post #2

    nixpc Now the third problem I have with the dashboard is that there is no way to check for outdated extensions, this would be a pretty good feature in order to help keep the extensions up to date, which is pretty hard to do now.

    You can run the following command from SSH inside your flarum root directory, and this will provide your with a list of available updates for extensions you have installed

    composer outdated -D

    Note that this will list Symphony but don't update that 👍

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        • Post #3

        [deleted] This also works composer show --outdated --direct

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            • Post #5

            nixpc the Bazaar extension used to do (and still does) this, but I think that's being deprecated.

                nixpc I still think it should probably be included in the dashboard since it's easier

                It definitely would be easier, but the question is, how to get that data? Option one would be an official extension marketplace, but that doesn't exist, and would be a significant undertaking. Option two is bundling composer directly with Flarum, but that would take up a LOT of space and memory. And what if you have private extensions installed locally? I'd love to see a better extension management experience too, and I'm sure that after stable there will be a lot of discussions about it. But until then, it's unfortunately a wishlist item.

                    [deleted] I'm staying away from that extension, I tried installing it like a month ago and it completely bricked my forum 😕 Not sure what went wrong and didn't care to troubleshoot it so I just removed it and then my forum worked again.

                      askvortsov I'm not that well versed with PHP but perhaps there is some way to check if composer is installed on the system with exec() ? And if composer is installed it'd display all the outdated ones, if not, it wouldn't show outdated extensions. Would that work?

                          nixpc possible probably, but the implementation would be tricky and exec is... Unsavory. I'd rather hold off a bit until we have the infrastructure to implement a cleaner solution. Until then, I think Clark's lab checks for versions?

                              askvortsov I'm not sure how composer works so I'll just try and speak in generic terms. Wouldn't it be possible to get a list of the versions and packages from the composer.json file and then request the latest version from the repositories and see if one of them is outdated with some HTTP requests?

                              Also what exactly is Clark's lab?

                                  nixpc Wouldn't it be possible to get a list of the versions and packages from the composer.json file and then request the latest version from the repositories and see if one of them is outdated with some HTTP requests?

                                  Definitely possible, but messy, and would only serve as a temporary solution. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but I think it would be better to hold off until we're able to take a look at managing the extension ecosystem as a whole. Right now, the teams focus is on finishing up the last bits and pieces needed for our stable release.

                                  And Clark's lab is a tool built by the incredible @clarkwinkelmann that scans flarum installations for configuration and extension issues: https://lab.migratetoflarum.com/

                                  EDIT: Also what David said

                                      datitisev Yeah I'd love to install that if it had the graphs, I love looking at those.

                                          askvortsov Wow you guys are that close already? That's awesome!
                                          Can't wait for the stable release 😃

                                          And thanks for that link, does it also look for outdated extensions? I wouldn't know because all my extensions are currently updated ^^

                                            nixpc The graphs are added by flarum/statistics. My extension does not replace them. They will still be in the same place 🙂.

                                                datitisev Awesome! I'll definitely install it then! How do you deal with trying to find out if extensions are outdated by the way? We have been arguing over that in this post 😛

                                                  datitisev I'm not sure this is because all my extensions are updated but I don't seem to have a way to check for updates, is this normal, or does it just not check for updates?