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 a Dungeons & Dragons
I'm a role player. We play text role-playing games on forums in various genres, most often fantasy. We write posts in the third person for the created characters, improve their characteristics and play in the story events. I am currently creating a space role-playing forum for my friends and casual guests.
Until last month, we played on the old forum without updates in a very old design. I decided to update the role-playing and move to a new forum. The main requirement is open source, because it is difficult to pay for foreign services from my country.
As a person who did not open the developer console until the last month, I liked the Flarum, because it can be installed on your hosting literally through the archive and install plugins through an internal manager. To be honest, that's what motivated me to stay here.
Now I can already write something and actively use the terminal, so we can say that it was thanks to the Flarum that I began to improve my ability to write code 😅
The design of the Flarum does not look like the design of the forum
Do you know what forums look like most often? Something from 2010. A huge plus that I saw in the Flarum is the airy ☁️ design. I even started to rewrite the css styles of the installed plugins to be consistent with the style of the Flarum core.
To be honest, I would like to work on creating the design of some plugins, such as achievements or badges, but in terms of code, it is still difficult for me to transfer the design from Figma to anywhere. Special thanks for the opportunity to translate plugins, I added a lot of space and useful labels that improve the user's interaction with the interface.
What I would like to improve
As an active member of the community, some things excite me, and some things do not. This is normal and works like this everywhere. What would I change:
- Add an icon about incompatibility with the latest version of the engine in the catalog of all extensions. I broke the forum several times because I installed an extension with a compatibility filter for the latest version. And only then did I notice the incompatibility label in the extension discussion. Moreover, not all extensions have a discussion page, so you need to watch github to understand how long it has been updated. Add a mandatory requirement to create a discussion for extensions.
- A mandatory requirement to add screenshots of the extension. Sometimes I went through all the pages of the extensions using the poke method, because I missed the one I needed, since there was one line of information and no images
And in general, thanks for everything, Flarum❤️
