FriendsOfFlarum PWA - early testing

IanM

Hi Folks,

FriendsOfFlarum have recently adopted the old PWA extension originally published Progressive Web App (PWA) and Push Notifications back in 2020 by @askvortsov

The intention is to continue it's development and upgrade for Flarum 2.x soon, but before we do that, we need to get the 1.x port of it working as intended.

We've completed most of the work for the 1.x version already, but need help testing and documenting it. That's where you come in...

Can you spend some time giving it a test drive? We're looking for any potential bugs, typos, etc that would prevent a full release initially. Once we have released the first version, we'll then move forward with improvements, new features, etc, etc.

Know your way around the extension, it's settings, quirks and 'gotchas'? We need YOU to help document in the extension's README.md - please consider contributing here as well!

Github repo: FriendsOfFlarum/pwa
Report Issues here: FriendsOfFlarum/pwaissues

How to install?

composer require fof/pwa:"1.x-dev"

You may need to add the following to your composer.json

...
"minimum-stability": "dev",
"prefer-stable": true

Please, give this a spin, report back on how you get on, and thank you from us for lending a hand!

KBExit

IanM I'll give it a spin! Thanks Ian!

KBExit

Is there a warmup period for this extension to work?
Chrome Mobile, cannot get notifications at all.

Chrome App: Notifications configured for my website.
Chrome App: Installed to Home screen.
Vapid Keys, logos, etc all good in Extension Settings and Enabled.
Left the default value of 20 notifications in the extension settings.

Nothing comes through.
No failures in Laravel Horizon.
No logs.

TLDR; I just want to make sure there is no warmup period of the extension to work before I submit an issue. This way it's not just nothing.

Edit, I logged out and logged back in and hit the "opt-in" button on my profile settings. Retrying it now.

Jake Wilson

I have a few test servers I want to try it on, mostly looking for incompatibility issues

KBExit

Went ahead and submitted Notification issues here: FriendsOfFlarum/pwa2

Forogramero

KBExit How this extension is going?? Is it safe to use??

KBExit

Forogramero it's safe to use, but push notifications don't work on Android at least. Idk about iPhone or desktop.

stryguardian

I just tested this. I am receiving notifications on desktop, Android and iPhone.

KBExit

stryguardian hmmm. I wonder if it's because I have realtime then? I've never received a notification on my test forum.
I'll spin up a clean install later and try again perhaps.

Could also be very much my phone acting up too.

Forogramero

I'll try it now... Thanks

KBExit

Yeah it should work. It's my phone that's broken. I cannot seem to figure out what's causing it. Probably need to factory reset it, but that's too much.
Confirmed it with my clients that use it. So I know it's not my ecosystem, not the extension, not anything else, but my phone being stupid..

Silvestrus

KBExit you can reset application by clearing memory in application info and start over again. Pay attention to enable notifications for application as well.

KBExit

Silvestrus yeah I've done all of that and made sure of it. Manually enabled for each site as well.
But now that I think of it, I am not receiving push notifications for my other PWAs either, even with the manual config.
Something is conflicting it and this is going Off topic lol.
I need to figure it out on my own or just get a new phone later.
Just unfortunate that I was the first one to install and test it, and couldn't help since my phone is garbage.

ikkeT

Will the mobile users need to "reinstall" the pwa after the plugin is changed to this fof one? Or will it continue to work in mobiles the same as before the plugin change?

stryguardian

ikkeT The PWA installed on members' phones should not have to be reinstalled, unless you changed the forum logo and you want them to have the new logo as the app icon.

If it still points to the same domain, it should work just fine. I've already installed my forum's PWA when it was Discourse and used the same PWA on my phone after moving to Flarum. So, there should be no issues.

ikkeT

stryguardian thanks for the info, that's really good!

flavour1

It would be really great if you could make the share buttons optional with a setting in the admin panel.
Should not be too complicated since it is seperate js that is loaded (addShareButtons.js)

I have had this request since a while and somehow managed to make a dirty edit that works on my forum so far, but I dont dare to make any changes now and would really like to test a flarum 2.0 installation with a proper PWA and Push extension without the share-buttons at some point.

https://discuss.flarum.org/d/37680-remove-share-buttons-from-progressive-web-app-extension

Thank you for all your great work on making extensions ready for 2.0, @IanM !