extension part is the strongest and weakest part of flarum

murdocklawless

my two months flarum experience is that way. of course I'm not talking about official extensions.

strongest part,

you can easily install an extension, childs play if you are not using a custom theme.
install an extension, try it and if you don't like, uninstall it, this is it. so easy and no problems. you can not do that easily at smf and any other classic forum software.

weakest part,

some 3rd party extensions may conflict with other extensions and brake their functions. As far as I can see this is the most common problem.
some useful 3rd party extensions were abandoned.
some bugs may take a long time to be corrected.

Hari

murdocklawless that's the reason i mostly prefer to use official or FoF extensions and default theme and keep it light weight for easy update

luceos

murdocklawless if you came to this conclusion you can probably count yourself an expert in Flarum webmastering 😉

Because you are right! Flarum is excellent because you can "tune" Flarum with extensions exactly how you need. And especially during beta's there were often extensions conflicting. This still happens and whenever it happens the usual solution lies with the extension, if that is not the case than the core team can usually patch something for a future release.

Regardless, the bigger the extension, the higher the chance of conflicting with or voiding another extension.

murdocklawless some useful 3rd party extensions were abandoned.

You can always request FoF to adopt an extension. An adopted extension would receive minimal attention to get it working, but at least it would remain active inside the scene. Making a case for each of these extensions would help the ecosystem too.

murdocklawless some bugs may take a long time to be corrected.

This is probably true for extensions and sometimes for core. And this is more so a drawback of open source I think. Once the ecosystem is large enough and people start making more money off of Flarum, the willingness to commission fixes should increase too.

murdocklawless

luceos if you came to this conclusion you can probably count yourself an expert in Flarum webmastering

I'm not afraid of asking anything. I love to learn and apply.

luceos Regardless, the bigger the extension, the higher the chance of conflicting with or voiding another extension.

isn't there a way to avoid conflicts? and I'm wondering why these conflicts happen? same variable, same array, same api or same something?

luceos You can always request FoF to adopt an extension. An adopted extension would receive minimal attention to get it working, but at least it would remain active inside the scene. Making a case for each of these extensions would help the ecosystem too.

I think I can't do this. Probably people have something to do instead of this for living.

clarkwinkelmann

murdocklawless isn't there a way to avoid conflicts? and I'm wondering why these conflicts happen?

In my experience conflicts are relatively rare, but here are some of the things that stand out:

Flarum's PHP extenders should be used everywhere possible instead of service providers or file overrides. Some advanced features still need to do this and it increases the risk of conflicts
On the javascript side, ItemLists and object(key-value)-based extends should be used. Extending or overriding virtual DOM increases risk of conflicts. Extending outside of the virtual DOM (direct DOM manipulation) increases risks even further. But again there are reasons to do it, it should just be done carefully
Post formatting should be augmented through the TextFormatter API where possible to avoid conflicts

I think the biggest compatibility issues will be around themes, since some layouts require extensive DOM changes. When you develop a private theme for your own website it's not a big deal, but creating a re-usable theme can be very difficult if it radically changes the design.

Extensions also sometimes have CSS conflicts but this is less of an issue because it usually doesn't break functionality.

010101

murdocklawless isn't there a way to avoid conflicts? and I'm wondering why these conflicts happen? same variable, same array, same api or same something?

And my 2 cents on this (not that you want my money or advice) is that I actually think this is common. At least for me, over the past 17 years that I’ve run various websites, no matter the platform, there are sometimes extension/plugin conflicts.

Sometimes an extension/plugin author may create something to fill a gap and to have a feature for their own site. It may work at their site just fine. They then share the extension here to be nice.

Also, Flarum is still young compare to other open source platforms. Another platform might have 10K, or even 100K+ extensions/plugins available. And so when you install one and there’s a conflict, you can usually find an alternative. Due to Flarum being young, you won’t find that here. You will find one extension that does a certain thing. Flarum just went stable fairly recently. This is why there aren’t a ton of extensions developers.