Flarum is so extensive and I enjoy creating extensions, either to gain knowledge and test, or to actually implement something new.
My main front-end knowledge is with Angular and fancy jQuery + Ajax module scaffolding, but Mithril and JSX / ES6 are really powerful and I may just start working with them more.
I usually look at full suites such as VBulletin, or somethings Vanilla, but they are mostly overkill, and are not as modern / optimized as Flarum (I'm in no way saying Flarum is totally optimized as its only in Beta, but man is it light on resources). Flarum is pretty great for developers, and for a beta, it is actually pretty strong.
It also loosely uses Laravel, which is one of my main areas of 'expertise' (not really an expert, but it's my go-to framework for many a things), but its not totally using it, as the routing system can add a few hundred seconds to the load.
I've only played round with Flarum for let's say a week (a bit less) and as a system which is there to be built on and extended, it does the job very well indeed.
Onwards and upwards!
