Hi, this is a short story about how I met the Flarum. English is not my native language, but I will try to write it so that everyone understands me.
It looks like Dungeons & Dragons
I’m a role player. We play text-based role-playing games on forums across various genres, most often fantasy. We write posts in the third person for the characters we’ve created, improve their stats, and participate in story-driven events. Currently, I’m working on creating a space-themed role-playing forum for my friends and occasional guests.
Until last month, we used an old forum with outdated features and a very antiquated design. I decided to refresh our role-playing experience by moving to a new platform. My main requirement was open-source software, as it’s challenging to pay for foreign services from my country.
As someone who hadn’t even opened the developer console until last month, I was drawn to Flarum because it can be installed on your hosting simply by uploading an archive. Plugins can also be installed through its built-in manager. Honestly, this ease of use was what convinced me to stay with it.
Now, I’ve started learning to code and use the terminal more actively, so I can say that Flarum played a role in improving my technical skills 😅.
The design of Flarum doesn’t look like a typical forum
You know what most forums look like? Something from 2010. A major plus I noticed about Flarum is its clean, airy ☁️ design. I even started rewriting the CSS styles of installed plugins to match the Flarum core aesthetic.
To be honest, I’d love to work on designing plugins like achievements or badges. However, transferring designs from Figma to code is still challenging for me. Special thanks to Flarum for providing the ability to translate plugins—I’ve added a lot of space and useful labels to improve user interaction with the interface.
What I’d like to improve
As an active member of the community, there are some things I love and some that frustrate me. This is normal and happens everywhere. Here’s what I would change:
- Add an icon indicating incompatibility with the latest engine version in the extension catalog. I’ve broken my forum several times because I installed an extension filtered for the latest version but later noticed the incompatibility label in the extension discussion. Not all extensions have a discussion page, so you have to check GitHub to see how recently it was updated. I suggest making it mandatory to create a discussion thread for all extensions.
- Make screenshots of the extension mandatory. Sometimes, I had to sift through pages of extensions by trial and error because I missed the one I needed. A single line of information is often not enough, and screenshots would make it easier to understand an extension’s functionality at a glance.
Overall, thank you for everything, Flarum ❤️
