My thoughts and maybe some ideas? (Pls don't hate me!)

Ciel-01

So I've recently started using Flarum for a gaming community and some other stuff and just want to share my own opinions on it.

Sorry not sorry if I typed too much, but feedback is always helpful and can really help with the development of software, so I hope you enjoy reading!

Also sorry if what I've suggested has already been suggested!

It's a really well laid out and nicely built piece for forum software, it's probably one of the more modern ones that's not only open-source but still being developed on a regular basis and has a decent community behind it. That being said, it is missing a few things that some of the others have that Flarum doesn't.

Looking towards phpBB in the admin dashboard, it's neatly tabbed and all the extensions can be easily managed and found under one section. Flarum does have a section for the extensions but it's a little messier in my own opinion. I think instead of listing each plugin as its own block/menu item in the sidebar, it could have its own dedicated section. Would make it easier and give it an overall cleaner look when in the admin dashboard. Similar things could be done for themes.

And adding in a dedicated setting section for hCaptcha (who likes googles captcha, like really. its just really annoying and really weird to even find the page sometimes) would definitely be a bonus.

Another thing with the admin dashboard is that there's no kind of audit logs (that I've been able to find) but there is an extension for audit logs. It would be a nice feature to have in the core of Flarum in my opinion.

There could also be a dashboard in place for moderators and something like a reports section etc.. just your general moderator tools if anything.

The design and clean look the front end has is nice, but if there were a few options to add a background image to the main forum and give similar options to user profile pages would definitely give it a nice look and feel depending on the use of it.

More on the layout of the main forum page, it would be nice to be able to create custom widgets (without using an extension) and be able to place them on the left or the right side as a whole new sidebar menu kind of thing but purely for widgets? (With the option to switch them to the left or right, same with the navigation sidebar?)

Something I would really like to see too is kind of like a drag and drop builder for the main forum page, so instead of having to use code the building blocks are already there and can be dropped into any part of the page or menu. Now I know this may seem kind of pointless because a lot of people and myself included probably already know how to add extra content like a carousel feed with twitch channels at the top of the main page. But those that don't know how to do this would probably go looking for an extension or give a hand at it themselves and eventually give up because they can't get it to work or they can't get it to look right.

To the user profiles! There's kind of a lack of options when it comes to user profiles, not that's never a bad thing. Too many options and settings tend to get confusing, we've all been there and wondered why there were so many GOD DAMN OPTIONS for a single setting! But I think the user settings could be put into separate menu tabs, the one forum software I found that does this somewhat decently but is just too blocky and clunky is MyBB. I think if there was a more ordered user setting, it could allow for more options and settings like social media links, links to websites and such and could be used to make custom modules.

Now I may have gone on about the profiles but I think things like OAuth logins and LDAP auth should definitely be a core feature, as on my own forum I'm actually looking at disabling normal user logins and creating (eventually) a plugin that allows users to login with discord accounts but also bridge discord and flarum.

So if a user logged in via discord, they'd be joined to the server automatically and gives the user the correct roles. And building on this, you could then add in things like for example you muted someone on the forum for say 2 hours, you'd get the option to time them out on discord, same with banning but it'd remove them from the discord or suspending a forum account, could suspend their forum account but keep them in the discord so you could talk to them for whatever reason.

Thinking on the expandability of Flarum, I'm certain there'll be some form of marketplace/currency extension so with that in mind, it could be a good idea to go ahead and make something a little more permanent and add in some marketplace features? Most communities these days almost always have someone and some people that do commissions or have hosted their own game servers (would also be awesome if there was something added that actually allows us to create integrations for games and such) and having a marketplace with a currency system or the ability to spend money and whatnot could lead to more and more people using Flarum than phpBB, MyBB and even Xenforo.

So features like a marketplace or drag and drop page editor and all that could really make Flarum stand out far more than the rest. Like all the existing forum software are either, outdated, somewhat useful but then no community behind it for development on plugins and such or in the case of some like Xenforo, can set people back a good $160 for a license.

In my opinion, Flarum already is an amazing piece of forum software, it's modern, nice design and has an active and lively community behind it. But it's just missing some key features that could really sell it and have more and more people using it.

Hell, I'll even happily put a "Powered by Flarum" on my forum because out of all the forum software I've seen and used, you're one of the only few that hasn't put any kind of branding tag on it.

I barely even make forum posts on forums that are not run by me or someone I know, let alone type so much for feedback and ideas! 🤣

I hope I've inspired some ideas, still not sorry for the essay!!

askvortsov

Thank you so much for your thoughts and ideas! It's clear that you're genuinely interested and passionate about the success of the project, and that means a lot. I'll try to address most of your points either generally or specifically, although Clark has already done a great job and my thinking aligns well with his.

Ciel-01 I think instead of listing each plugin as its own block/menu item in the sidebar, it could have its own dedicated section.

This is the layout we used to have, and I think that eventually, we should strive for something in between. Some ideas:

Tabs on the left-hand nav of the admin dashboard are driven by purpose, not extension. Sometimes extensions may add entire tabs of their own (e.g. Tags, SEO, PWA, etc), but in many other cases, that's not necessary. I think we might want to consider going back to how things were before, with the extension directory on a page.
It should be possible to find all settings registered by an extension, regardless of where they end up going. In some cases (e.g. adding a setting to a list of settings) this is simple enough; however, we'd need to figure out how to handle extensions that add settings to create forms, or to completely custom pages that don't use app.extensionData. Not sure if this is possible.
Some extensions only really need a toggleable on/off switch, not a whole page.

Ciel-01 dedicated setting section for hCaptcha (who likes googles captcha, like really. its just really annoying and really weird to even find the page sometimes) would definitely be a bonus.

Wouldn't that be up to the extension developers?

Ciel-01 there's no kind of audit logs (that I've been able to find) but there is an extension for audit logs. It would be a nice feature to have in the core of Flarum in my opinion.

The audit log extension's page in the admin dashboard includes an audit log; this should be available in the free version too

Ciel-01 There could also be a dashboard in place for moderators and something like a reports section etc.. just your general moderator tools if anything.

Eventually, I want to see a "moderation queue" in Flarum where all stuff that needs mod attention (flags, username change requests, etc) would be aggregated.

Ciel-01 few options to add a background image to the main forum

This seems simple enough to do via custom CSS

Ciel-01 More on the layout of the main forum page, it would be nice to be able to create custom widgets (without using an extension) and be able to place them on the left or the right side as a whole new sidebar menu kind of thing but purely for widgets? (With the option to switch them to the left or right, same with the navigation sidebar?)

Customizable widgets with potential drag and drop is something we are hoping to eventually see (it's in our roadmap, but it won't be for a while because there are some technical challenges.

Ciel-01 think things like OAuth logins and LDAP auth should definitely be a core feature

I don't want to tie core itself to OAuth/LDAP/SAML/any other standard, but I would like to see a well-designed notion of "external logins" in core. In fact, my first major PR was something like this. Perhaps this is worth eventually revisiting, but again, time restrictions make this difficult.

Ciel-01 you're one of the only few that hasn't put any kind of branding tag on it

Well, to be completely honest, there is an X-POWERED-BY header that can be disabled. But that's moreso to help understand adoption trends.

Umutcan First of all the SEO plugin should get overhauled and be part of the core.

I've heard this sentiment a lot, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument as to why. Are there current limitations in core's framework that are preventing the SEO extension from achieving desired results? I hear "flarum has bad SEO" thrown around quite frequently, but aside from the nofollow link issue, I don't recall any serious issues at the moment.

Ciel-01 so many extensions that could be made part of the core and integrated really well

As Clark mentioned, Flarum Core is a framework, not a full product. I don't really see entire extensions being integrated into core unless there's a strong need for some extensibility.

Ciel-01 Hopefully, I'll be able to make some decent extensions and share them eventually >.>

Glad to hear that, I look forward to seeing what you come up with! Also, based on some of what you've discussed, you might want to consider trying out core development. There's a lot of really interesting, impactful challenges to solve, and you certainly have ideas and drive. Kinda reminds me of me; when I was just starting out with Flarum, one of my first posts was also a list of ideas to improve the Flarum extension world: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/22732-thoughts-on-the-extension-ecosystem 😁

Umutcan

First of all the SEO plugin should get overhauled and be part of the core. Please hear my cry.

Ciel-01

Umutcan Haha, there are so many extensions that could be made part of the core and integrated really well. I hope I do convince them do make some changes with my essay.

clarkwinkelmann

Thanks for the extensive feedback! I'll answer some of the points but I'll try to stay brief or my post will be twice as long as yours 😂

First, yes, 100% all the mentioned features should exist, and in the Flarum ecosystem it makes sense to make each feature a separate extension unless it needs radical changes in the framework to become possible. The idea is to always keep the core/framework as light as possible.

Regarding core extensions vs community extensions, it's always a though choice. We have limited manpower in the Flarum team, so we need to make choices on where that effort is put. We are prioritizing the core/framework itself as well as a limited set of extensions. Adding more core extensions means more burden on the team and increases the risk we can't give each extension the care it deserves.

Of course the list of core extensions will likely evolve in the future. A few were outlined in our recently updated roadmap. It's always a tough choice to decide which extensions to officially maintain and which ones to leave for community developers. OAuth used to be part of core, but we decided to leave the extension to the community because it made more sense to have OAuth be a bigger extensions with many social providers, and it was too much work to troubleshoot every time there were changes in those providers.

FriendsOfFlarum is independent from the Flarum team but kind of acts as a collection of very useful extensions that the Flarum team couldn't handle as part of the regular release cycle.

Now for my personal vision (which I believe is also shared by some of the other members), I am of the opinion that the Flarum team should only focus on the core/framework itself. Core extensions should mostly exist as an integration test, to demonstrate and verify Flarum extensibility. So ideally we should have core extensions that use every extender endpoints that Flarum has to offer, as a way to confirm everything works as intended and to serve as example to developers. The other extensions that make the most sense to me are those directly linked to legal or security issues.

There is an ongoing discussion about core extensions vs bundled extensions. It's not out of questions to bundle more extensions that aren't directly developed by the Flarum team in the future, it's just a question of what process do we use to ensure those bundled extensions meet the quality standards we expect from core extensions. Also any bundled extension needs to be verified compatible with new Flarum versions before the day of release so it's a lot to ask from developers. Internal quality testing is already quite complex with the current set of core extensions we have to test for every release.

PS: regarding the marketplace thing, I actually have something in the work, but it's still not quite finished yet.

Ciel-01

clarkwinkelmann

To be perfectly honest, I was expecting a long response back to my post lol.

I understand what you mean by the core extensions and such, would be tiresome to keep them maintained and having to push the update even for the smallest change.

Just one question I forgot to add in my post, where do I find the template for making my own extension? 😅

clarkwinkelmann

Ciel-01 we are expanding the documentation at https://docs.flarum.org/extend

The easiest way to create new extensions is to use the CLI utility https://docs.flarum.org/extend/cli but another option is to copy-paste an existing extension as the starting point.

An extension can be as simple as a composer.json and extend.php files depending on what it does. Extensions that use javascript are a bit more complex but the CLI can help to get everything setup here as well.

Ciel-01

clarkwinkelmann

Thanks! I'd rather start from scratch than use an already existing extension as a template.

Hopefully, I'll be able to make some decent extensions and share them eventually >.>

Hari

Internal linking SEO issue!