📖 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 3 of our community updates 2022 we featured a stunning interview with FreeFlarum - feel free to skip back to this post in case you are interested. But now lets move on to our newest update.
🔔 Push Notifications, App Support - is this a thing?
Most websites - including of course discussion forums - are seeing increasing traffic from mobile clients, well exceeding half of the users. Naturally - and especially when compared with social networks - support for push notifications as well as a separate app are a big deal. While there currently are no apps supporting Flarum - there are ways to achieve (parts) of this functionality with existing Flarum extensions.
PWA - Progressive Web App
Both Android and iOS phones / tablets are able to install PWA applications. This allows you to run your Forum with a dedicated icon on your phone without the need to open / run the browser. While Android allows also push notifications for PWA applications iOS does currently not - although support is planned for iOS 17. Here is a short video showing you how to use a PWA on your phone:
In order to add this to your community you will need to install the PWA extension by @askvortsov. To make the application feel more real time you should think about adding Websockets to your community. There are different options available for that, which are highlighted in an community update back from 2021.
Native App support - is it coming soon?
Making a app is a complex process and involves a lot of effort - both one time as well as in long term maintanance. The Flarum team has currently not the necessary ressources to tackle such a project. So there will be no official apps launching anytime soon. Flarum offers an extensive API though, so making an APP as a community project is still very possible. There have been some efforts to start this but as of right now there is no community driven app project in the works.
📰 Other News
📢 Flarum Lang
Lately - and especially due to the work of @rob006 and @Justoverclock our language-gurus/coordinators - a lot of new languages have been introduced to the Flarum Language Project. There are now 40 languages on boarded! You can see those new additions over on GitHub - and more importantly on Weblate. If you want to contribute to an existing language you can most easily do so on Weblate. Of course there is always the possibility to add new languages to the project as well. If you are interested in this, get in touch with the Language Coordinators.
🏴☠️ Bounties
With Flarum being a stable software it was necessary to clean up feature requests. A new structure has been introduced to the proposals tag here on discuss. Within this tag we are using FoF Gamification to introduce a up-voting feature. Every community member has the ability to propose and up-vote features of the most interest to him/herself.
Besides the introduction of a new and cleaned up way to propose new features within the Flarum ecosystem - bounties have also been introduced. When a proposal is clearly enough specified a bounty may be requested. This will allow a certain feature request to be community funded. Any developer has the chance to pick up the money gathered in the bounty to implement the feature. The terms can be read within our community guidelines in detail.
Going forward with the community update I will highlight all ongoing bounties so you have a chance to follow the progress - or might even consider chipping in a few bucks to make the feature a reality. I am especially happy that two of the four active bounties have already been picked by a developer to be implemented!
🕸️ Extension Highlights
New & Noteworthy
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.
