• Meta

  • Dev forum updated – watch out for regressions!

This is the first time we've pushed an update in about a month, since we commenced a big cleanup of Flarum's codebase and extension API. The cleanup was quite dramatic, and unfortunately this means it's very likely that there will be new bugs and regressions. Please keep your eyes open and report any issues you see!

While most of the update is to do with the backend, there are a few new features on the surface:

  • Updated discussion list look. Tags now display over on the right side to make better use of space and make the left side less noisy.
  • Refresh button on the discussion list. This will be automatically hidden by the Pusher extension when I get around to writing that.
  • Improved formatting. A live preview displays behind the composer while you're replying – just scroll down to see it. If you're editing a post, the live preview will be shown as the post's content. And we now support BBCode and Markdown out of the box. This is all thanks to @JoshyPHP's amazing TextFormatter library!
  • Twemoji and emoticons. 🎉🎈 Emojis are automatically converted to Twemoji so everyone sees them the same. And we convert some common text emoticons (like :) and :() into Twemoji too.
  • Various bug fixes and polish.

Also note that we've moved to a server in New York, so depending on your location, Flarum may feel slightly faster or slightly slower. But in terms of application performance, Flarum is faster than ever!

    Toby stickied the discussion .

    Sounds all good to me. How's the roadmap going? I should bookmark the damn link one day lol.

    Yay!

    Looks like my favorite feature is the orange bar on top - for some reason this makes everything look so new 😉

    There goes my sweet sweet latency from Australia to Singapore. 🙁

    I kid, I kid. Keep up the good work guys.

    The preview is actually identical to how I envisioned it earlier today. I was actually going to post up the idea of showing it inline with the other replies but @Toby already beat me too it.

    Toby Did you just change the location or upgrading the DO instance as well?

    Currently I'm interested what is the system load for Flarum on DO 512MB instance, how many visitors per day too.

    Last, is the preview only showed up on desktop view? I don't see it in mobile view or is there something I should do when posting reply?

    • Toby replied to this.

        spasi Just changed the location, still on the 512 MB instance.

        A request to the discussion list takes ~350ms and 7MB of memory. A request for a page of posts is similar. Currently the server is sitting on 39% memory usage. I don't have analytics set up on the forum, but the homepage (flarum.org) gets about 200 visitors per day, and the forum is getting about 10 new user signups per day.

        The preview is only on desktop for now, yes. We'll work out some way to have it on mobile too later.

            Toby Thanks! What kind of server stack did you use to run Flarum? I want to test it later on NginX and (probably) OpenLiteSpeed.

            • Toby replied to this.

                Toby Also note that we've moved to a server in New York

                If you can make it there,
                You'll make it anywhere...!

                Congrats on the update, it's coming along nicely!

                  Toby Twemoji and emoticons. Emojis are automatically converted to Twemoji so everyone sees them the same. And we convert some common text emoticons (like 🙂 and 🙁) into Twemoji too.

                  @Toby, this feature is an extension?

                  • Toby replied to this.

                      We should probably add the preview feature when editing posts, too.

                        Franz The admin and moderator dots also don't appear in the preview, but that's not really a big deal. 🙂

                          The preview seems to make the text box sluggish. Could it be updated once the user stops typing for n milliseconds, or be updated on a timer instead of on every keystroke?

                            Fastidious Well, there's sluggishness for me, on both. Maybe less so on small posts, but still there. Big posts start to become very noticeable. Regardless a text box shouldn't have any compromises, typing is a rapid process.