📖 Introduction
Welcome to our newest community update. In this edition we want to take a closer look on how to bring your Flarum community to the next level. Also - like you are already used to - we will share interesting updates on the Flarum ecosystem, including the newest plugin additions. In Edition 1 of our community updates 2022 we have been looking on hosting options for Flarum - feel free to skip back to this post in case you are interested. But now lets move on to our newest update.
🖥️ Making more of Flarum
With the basic installation of Flarum you are getting a great - and very modern - community out of the box. We have been highlighting extensions in this format for a while now. Adding extensions can give you a great deal of additional functionality that might be beneficial to your community. Today we don't want to look at new features that you can add to your community - but rather look at technical improvements that can easily enhance you - and your users - experience with Flarum.
💽 Queues - synchronously vs asynchronous
With the default installation of Flarum requests are handled synchronously. To better explain this an example: If there are many people subscribed to updates of a post - sending a reply will let the user wait until all notifications have been sent. While in a small community this poses no disadvantages, there are going to arise problems when your community starts to grow. The easiest way to achieve an improvement is to install the database queues extension. There is a great description on what this plugin does when you follow the link. Basically it makes those requests asynchronous - improving performance a lot. There are also more complex solutions available for larger community, using redis queues & cache.
🗓️ Running the scheduler
Also when installing extensions you might see the need to run the Flarum scheduler in the background. This service is provided out of the box - but you have to make sure that you have started it. There is a well written guide available, also showing some extensions that use this functionality.
🔎 Supercharging Search
In a growing community your demands for the built-in search might grow. In such occasion you might be considering an extension that integrates Elastic Search into Flarum. This will allow for a very performant fulltext search within your growing community.
📰 Other News
Winning 20i Awards for 'Community & Social' 2022
We are very happy that we were able to win the 20i Award for Community & Social software 2022. This shows the tremendous progress that has been achieved within the recent month and years! You can read more about the awards on the respective website.
📣 Flarum News
Version 1.3 of Flarum has been released. You can read more about it on the dedicated release announcement.
This version includes many improvements for international communities in search, tags, slugs, etc.
Also there is a new and simplified way to leave your feature suggestions here on discuss. This also introduces the possibility to upvote requests so they get the most attention by the team. Read all about it in the announcement.
🕸️ Extension Highlights
New & Noteworthy
Open Source Extensions
Premium Extensions
🏁 Final words
We hope you have liked this edition of “Community Updates”. Looking forward to your comments and ideas for future updates. We are going to pickup speed again and hope to see you soon on the next edition of Community Updates.
