Who gone LIVE already with Flarum? Your experiences so far?

Needhelp

Hi All,

Questions

1) Who here have gone LIVE already with Flarum? Can you share all the problems or challenges you have encountered in getting the forum up and running and maintaining it on an ongoing basis?

2) Someone told me the user interface I see here in this very forum (eg: design, layout, color theme etc) is NOT the default , and if I choose to install Flarum now I will still need to do a lot of customizations in order to have a forum that looks like this one, is that true?

3) As I am writing this post, how come I do not see the text editor or text formatting options? For example, the option to Bold certain text in my post etc. I think last time I logged in I saw the text editor working already but this time around I do not see any options to format the text in my post.

Many thanks in advance !!

meetdilip

3 . The text editor is limited but it supports markdown and BB codes

1 . https://discuss.flarum.org/d/1617-anyone-using-flarum-in-production/

2 . See sites that are already in production ?

Needhelp

meetdilip See sites that are already in production

THANKS for the feedback. Yes I had already checked some of the sites that have gone LIVE, but am more interested in knowing what problems or challenges people have encountered in getting Flarum up and running and maintaining it on a day to day basis.

UaMV

I am running a private forum for a small team of 10. I'd not had experience with Composer prior to setting this up. There was a learning curve to that and I still need to ensure I follow upgrade tutorials to the T or else I might crash my site and need to come crawling back for help. We've also encountered needing to carry on private discussion for our team. Most of that currently happens via email, since the private messaging extension is not yet available. That has made things a bit challenging — keeping track of where the conversation has been had. I've also had several issues with folks getting 404s from link backs that may be included in emails. This is because folks are not logged in and not able to view the private discussion. However, currently the 404 does not redirect to a login screen, so folks give up and carry on the discussion via email.
There was not much customization needed to get a forum looking like this one. This is pretty standard. There are a few admin options to set colors and a space for custom CSS.
The limitation of having only Markdown available at this time has been a downer for my forum. The others have no experience with Markdown and, thus, don't format at all — or attempt to do so with their own conventions.

meetdilip

Needhelp The above post may help you in that context.

Once you set up, there are pretty much no issues other than a few known bugs which are ignorable.

FBI

Needhelp
I am use it and maintain it day to day basis.. It is huge forum... See my profile's posts ?

Needhelp

meetdilip and FBI Thanks both, much appreciated.

FBI, I read your other posts and you said you migrated from another platform to Flarum. Do you think if it will be possible to also migrate from Discourse to Flarum when the stable version of Flarum becomes available?

Probably not a fair question as nobody really knows unless someone has done this already. But just want to hear your thoughts on this.

Thanks !

Needhelp

AllysonSouzaNopSai and FBI Thanks both for sharing your experiences. Are you able to share the links to your community?

I have been testing the load speed for Flarum vs Discourse vs Nodebb (just based on observation on my phone, not scientifically). So far Flarum loads the fastest among all 3 but then again it may be because the Flarum community do not have that many posts or data, hence it loads a lot faster than Discourse and Nodebb. I would love to check out the load speed for large Flarum communities and see how it compares to Discourse and Nodebb.

meetdilip

Needhelp I am pretty sure that there will be a Discourse to Flarum converter once Flarum goes stable. Mainly because there would be many people who would like to move to Flarum from Discourse due to similar UI and a lot of other reasons.

AllysonSouzaNopSai

Actually I use in a Large community, and the performance is the best.

Needhelp

meetdilip I am pretty sure that there will be a Discourse to Flarum converter once Flarum goes stable. Mainly because there would be many people who would like to move to Flarum from Discourse due to similar UI and a lot of other reasons.

meetdilip THANKS, that would be huge, I most certainly hope that is the case. Of course, not gonna hold you or anyone to this, but nonetheless very encouraging know that there is a good possibility a Discourse to Flarum converter will be introduced after Flarum has gone stable.

I love everything about Flarum, and it is so much cleaner and less cluttered than Discourse. Look forward to seeing the stable version.