PianoTell on Flarum

navindra

I just wanted to say thank you to all the Flarum (and FreeFlarum) developers and contributors.

Not too long ago, I felt very motivated to fork off a new piano forum from a more venerable one that's based on UBB.threads. I knew of PianoClack which is based on Flarum, and after some initial research, I decided to try Flarum as well.

I began prototyping with FreeFlarum, which basically got me 99% of the way there for 10% of the effort and was good enough for an initial launch.

Then I spent quite a bit of effort trying to figure out independent hosting for PianoTell using Docker containers. That basically took me another 90% of work to get me the remaining 1%. 😉

Now the site is running on one of Hetzner Cloud's cheapest tiers and the ARM64 VM isn't even breaking a sweat. I don't want to jinx it, but it's been rock solid for over a week for our small community — Cloudflare says half a million requests.

Flarum is an impressive piece of work!

I received a lot of help here, with a special callout to @luceos and @clarkwinkelmann.

I used several key extensions by many other developers. Flarum Categories is the one that's most obvious, but there are many others I'm using and more that I already intend to use.

There are certainly some downsides to Flarum, an example being that key extensions can be in various states of maintenance. However, with it all being open source, fixing issues is within my control and that's liberating as well!

Thank you all for making PianoTell possible! 🙂

User25

navindra Very nice, looks beautiful. Please allow the question - how did you setup exactely the user badges?

luceos

navindra i was reading your journal on the hosting transition. But you really made a massive leap there, well done!

navindra

luceos Thank you! 🙂

User25 Thank you!

The badges are via Flarum group permissions. Since Flarum allows you to assign a color and a FontAwesome icon, I simply made use of that built-in functionality to simulate badges. Since it's a permission, only an administrator can dole out the badges.

In the beginning, I also used these permissions to restrict certain functionality such as Profile Covers because we didn't have a whole lot of storage.

User25

navindra Thank you. Such a brilliant idea for a manual approach on this!

evrimcode

The home page and category are very nice. Congratulations.

endlessedits

@navindra

You have inspired me to consider containerizing my Flarum site and have provided some great info on how to get started at https://forum.pianotell.com/d/785-piano-tell-hosting-updates. Your writing is unusually clear and inviting, thanks for sharing your hard-won experience with the rest of us.

It is clear you enjoy the computer stuff as much as the topic of your forum, piano. I think I am the same. Sometimes I spend more time on the Flarum than on doing what my forum site is trying to do.

Like PianoTell I have also built my site around the crucial askvortsov/flarum-categories extension that @askvortsov made.

My site is initially for my own content -- reviewing every one of many hundreds of recorded live performances by a certain guitar player. My hope is that each discussion (one for each show) will become a stable public repository for public commentary about each performance, and eventually about more general discussions of his career.

To ensure I can leave it for someone else to run someday, having it containerized in Docker might make that a lot easier.

My site is https://gimmemt.com if you want to take a look around.

Keep up the great work.

navindra

endlessedits My site is https://gimmemt.com if you want to take a look around.

Very nicely done indeed.

Thanks a lot for sharing!