The Future of Flarum in 2023: Balancing Open Source and Success

GoodTimes

Hello! First of all, thank you for your efforts and congratulations on the grant!

These planned updates are awesome, but I want to add some thoughts about some of them:

Moving from Less to Sass in compiling stylesheets;

Why Sass in 2023? I see a lot of projects already moving from Sass to clean, vanilla CSS, and it's a bit weird to see you moving from one outdated thing to another.

Which specific features of Sass are so needed that you chose it over CSS? Was this decision well-thought-out, or just "well, Less is super-old and losing popularity, let's move to something not that old"?

Code splitting of auto-generated JavaScript files;

This sounds very nice, and I love it! I would also love to see the same for CSS (see https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32245-significant-performance-improvement-by-splitting-of-css-to-multiple-files).

Theme design improvements

I hope these will include the ability to detect and handle the preferred color-scheme (light/dark) automatically. 🙂
(♥ CSS media query prefers-color-scheme)

SychO

GoodTimes Why Sass in 2023? I see a lot of projects already moving from Sass to clean, vanilla CSS, and it's a bit weird to see you moving from one outdated thing to another.

The current LESS prepocessor backend library has been abandoned and is holding the software down, and will at some point just stop working, there are no LESS package alternatives, so we have to move to something similar but maintained. There are well-maintained SCSS packages as far as I remember seeing.

Why not vanilla CSS?: That would be our preference, and we're still considering it, but there are simple features such as mixins and nesting that would be lost, which we value.

We're also considering alternative solutions that would allow us to only have the minimal features that we'd like only (like nesting and mixins), but as we haven't started looking into this in more depth, we don't know yet.

GoodTimes

SychO Native CSS nesting is live in Chrome and Edge, and it is coming to the rest of the browsers soon.

https://developer.chrome.com/articles/css-nesting/
https://caniuse.com/css-nesting

As we live in the world of evergreen browsers (except Safari), this feature will be available to most users by the 2.0 release date. Additionally, it's possible to use some post-processors (like https://postcss.org) to convert modern CSS to compatible with outdated browsers for as long as needed.

rafaucau

SychO What if, instead of using PHP for Sass compilation, styles were compiled using Webpack? I know that currently, styles are generated based on the forum settings, but you could simply add global CSS variables to the head of the page based on these forum settings, and then use them in the forum and extension styles. This approach could enable the use of Hot Module Replacement (HMR), which could significantly speed up development. Moreover, it would allow for dynamic importing of styles, adding another level of flexibility to the development process. It would also make it possible to have Flarum mixin autocomplete in the editor, which would be an additional benefit. Additionally, JavaScript-based Sass packages and other style-related libraries would likely receive better support than their PHP counterparts.

MoshBit

I honestly had no idea what Extiverse and Blomstra were until I looked them up after reading the OP here, so I agree consolidating all this stuff into one place sounds like a great idea. As someone new to Flarum, it's been kind of difficult to wrap my head around all the stuff here, it does seems a bit too spread out.

Looking forward to things developing here in the future, and I hope Flarum sticks around for a long time 🙂

fragicide

This is incredible news! Consolidating everything into one location and entity is definitely the smart move rather than having all the information and extensions scattered around the web. I've been following this project since 2015, and even run a few of my own instances, and can say without a doubt it has improved tenfold over the years, and I'm doubly excited to see what happens in the future!

MrQberry

I'm truly looking forward to v2 and I'm over the moon that you're moving away from LESS and going to use SASS. All of my day-to-day projects use SASS so being able to use it for Flarum makes me giddy with excitement. I'll be able to make use of my vast collection of SCSS code snippets while customising my forum. Thank you so much 🙂

luceos

MrQberry don't tell anyone, but we actually decided to do this because we knew you would enjoy it.

😉👍

gogog

It will be really nice to see Postgres, that's a blocker for me. You'll be able to connect Flarum to services like Supabase.

dragsugur

Tests for the frontend;
Theme design improvements;

i dont totally understand this but with 2.0 can we expect easier ways to edit and create themes? do you plan to use templates system (akin to mybb) or is it even possible?

chrisc297

On the new Next.Flarum site, is there going to be plans where you can create your own hosted Flarum community? Any idea of prices?

luceos

chrisc297 yes this will be possible. We have simplified pricing (compared to Blomstra) to match the number of simultaneous users (guests, members, excluding bots) the plan supports (soft limited), 1 euro per 1 concurrent user. Initially we will allow plans starting at 50 euro for 50 simultaneous users, but I hope to lower that to 25 within a few months after the new site goes live.

https://next.flarum.org/hosting

Justman10000

Really awesome new website! Let's see when it finally goes online

Justman10000

luceos early 2022 Blomstra was founded to answer the call for professional services in the ecosystem and invest back into the project unconditionally.

It sounds like Bloomstra is from Flarum itself! On the new website Bloomstar also has Flarum B.V. as its title!

How can that be according to this statement in the footer on its website?

Blomstra LTD is not affiliated with Flarum and its Foundation. Flarum is trademarked and the logo copyrighted by the Flarum Foundation.

GreXXL

Justman10000 I think it's well explained in the initial post what the future plans are. I suggest you read it in total but the relevant part quoted:

luceos Flarum Commercial

Within the next couple of months we will unify many of the ecosystem portals into one central place for everything Flarum. In addition to the Flarum Foundation, to safeguard Flarum as a stable, maintained and healthily developed-on product, a commercial entity is incorporated that operates under the same name. This company is merging the Flarum website, Extiverse and Blomstra features and services into one new website for centralised information, news and services related to Flarum.

Justman10000

GreXXL

I read that... And?

melihbey

I think the Flarum ecosystem needs to grow. Users need more extensions.

But I love Flarum.🙂

Justman10000

melihbey

What do you mean? Are the over literal 160 extensions not enough? 🤣

melihbey

How many of the 160 extensions are still up to date?
And how many of them actually work?
For example, there is still no private messaging system. Byubo, it's a temporary solution to me.
I'm not saying this to discourage morale.
I really like Flarum.
but the flarum does not move forward with the effort of the FOF alone.

askvortsov

First of all, according to extiverse there's 674: https://extiverse.com/

I'm of the opinion that more development, more features, better code, and cleaner design are always positive, regardless of how many extensions exist at any given time. There's always more to build.

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