Introducing the Official Extension Discovery (Beta)

huseyinfiliz · 2026-06-11T08:58:45+00:00

Hi Flarum Community, A while ago, I shared a prototype thread about creating a better discovery experience for Flarum extensions. Today, I am incredibly thrilled to announce that we have taken the first massive step toward making this a reality! The new official Extension Discovery platform is now live at: 👉 https://next.flarum.org/extensions We wanted to build a modern, fast, and unified hub that bridges the gap between extension developers and forum administrators. While this is just the beginning and currently in beta, it already packs some powerful features under the hood. 🚀 What’s Under the Hood Right Now? Automated Discovery & Sync: Extensions published on Packagist are automatically discovered. The platform seamlessly blends data from GitHub and Packagist to build comprehensive extension detail pages. The "Featured" Algorithm (Our Secret Sauce): We’ve implemented a custom, advanced algorithm for the Featured page. Much like the YouTube algorithm, it updates dynamically. It ensures brand-new extensions get the visibility they deserve, while also resurfacing older, established extensions whenever they regain momentum or see sudden updates. Trending Page: Track what’s hot in the ecosystem! You can now sort extensions based on their daily, monthly, and all-time download counts. Flexible Sorting & Filtering: On the main list, you can filter extensions by Flarum compatibility (1.x / 2.x) and categories. You can also sort by recently updated, most downloaded, GitHub stars, or alphabetically (A-Z). Dedicated Developer Profiles: Every extension developer now gets a clean, dedicated profile page. Your GitHub data syncs automatically, giving you a beautiful, minimalist link to showcase your entire Flarum portfolio to the world. 👉 https://next.flarum.org/extensions/huseyinfiliz Note on Sync Times: During this beta phase, newly published extensions might take up to 24 hours to appear in the directory. However, updates to existing extensions are processed much faster. Post-beta, our goal is to eliminate this delay entirely for near-instant indexing. 🔮 The Future Vision (What’s Next?) This is a long-term project, and we have big plans to make extension pages incredibly robust. Here is a glimpse of what we are brainstorming and planning for the future: Deep Flarum Discuss Integration: We want to bring the community discussion directly into the directory. By fetching the Discuss discussion link from the extension's composer.json, we aim to display recent comments, likes, and other community metadata directly on the extension page. AI-Powered Categorization: To go beyond the basic category tags, we plan to utilize AI to analyze extensions and automatically assign smart, highly specific tags for a much deeper and more accurate filtering experience. Premium Extensions: In the future, we look forward to integrating and listing premium/paid extensions right alongside open-source ones to fully support our developer ecosystem. 💬 We Want Your Feedback! Thanks for your feedback on the original prototype. The beta is now live: @Karl @luceos @IanM @ernestdefoe @Forogramero @treyb @endlessedits @andrewjs18 @Walid @Wlork @GreXXL @JasonHacks @codeX @Bavarian @stryguardian This platform is built for you the Flarum community. As we refine the beta, we would love to hear your thoughts: How does the Featured algorithm feel to you? Are you discovering interesting extensions? What features or specific metadata would you love to see added to the extension detail pages or developer profiles? Any UI/UX suggestions to make browsing even smoother? Check it out, play around with the filters, find your own developer profile, and let us know what you think in the replies below! Happy discovering! 🚀 👉https://next.flarum.org/extensions/

Capybara

huseyinfiliz marketplace

Good choice 😎

andrewjs18

huseyinfiliz nice work. the page is easier to read now!

huseyinfiliz

Subarist ClaudiusH Capybara

Marketplace Update

A few improvements have been added to the Extension Marketplace:

🖼️ Local image hosting: Extension images and profile photos are now downloaded locally during synchronization instead of being served directly from GitHub. Once the synchronization process is complete (which may take approximately one week), these images will be served locally.
🛡️ Default extension icon: A default extension icon is now displayed when an extension image cannot be loaded.

(https://next.flarum.org/extensions/fof/pwa)

📝 Markdown support: Markdown callout formats are now supported, including:
- [!NOTE]
- [!TIP]
- [!IMPORTANT]
- [!WARNING]
- [!CAUTION]

🔎 Font Awesome icon support has also been improved, with broader support for all Font Awesome versions and variants.

These changes should make image delivery more reliable and reduce our dependency on GitHub for serving extension and profile images.

All feedback received so far has been addressed. I’d love to hear more of your ideas, suggestions, and criticism. Please visit https://next.flarum.org/extensions and, most importantly, try to break things! 😄

Tutrix

huseyinfiliz
A quick note 😉
You've added !important to some of your CSS color definitions. As a result, the orange hover effect for text and borders no longer works in Dark Mode.
Example for text:

.dark .text-gray-900 {
  color:#f1f5f9!important;
}

huseyinfiliz

Tags & Related Extensions

Extensions now have tags and a new Related tab to make extension discovery easier and help users find relevant alternatives and complementary extensions.

The current tagging system primarily analyzes and processes the tags provided by extension authors in their composer.json files using an algorithm to determine the most relevant tags. We plan to introduce a more advanced, AI-powered approach in the future to improve how extensions are related and categorized.

The Related tab can help you:

🔍 Find the original extension when an extension is effectively a copy of another project but hasn't been marked as a fork.

🔄 Discover similar extensions that provide closely related features or functionality.

🧩 Find complementary extensions that can enhance or extend an extension's functionality when used together.

🏷️ Explore extensions by tags and discover other projects covering similar topics or use cases.

To keep recommendations useful, forked, abandoned, and outdated extensions are excluded from related-extension recommendations.

Overall, this is another step toward making it easier to discover extensions, find alternatives, and build the right combination of extensions for your community.

You can start exploring the new extension discovery features now at next.flarum.org/extensions

Please note that processing all extensions may take up to 24 hours, so some tags and related-extension recommendations may not be available immediately.

Forogramero

huseyinfiliz
It would be good if users could rate the extensions they download. A rating from 1 to 5 stars, as a way of thanking the developer and also as a quality beacon for the user.

huseyinfiliz

Forogramero Thank you for the suggestion! Since users don’t currently log in on the Marketplace, it wouldn’t be possible to rate extensions directly there. However, we have a few ideas for handling this. I’m looking forward to sharing more details here once everything is finalized.

huseyinfiliz

Extensions Store Performance Improvements

We've made some backend improvements to the Extensions store to keep it fast as traffic grows.

The Featured tab is now precomputed hourly instead of being calculated on every page load, and Flarum-version compatibility checks now use indexed lookups instead of a slower pattern match. This significantly reduces server load and keeps browsing snappy even during traffic spikes.

As part of this, the Featured tab no longer supports filters. It's a fixed curated list. Searching or filtering will now take you to the All tab instead.

No action needed on your end. This is a behind-the-scenes performance update. You can check it out at next.flarum.org/extensions

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