Introducing the Official Extension Discovery (Beta)

huseyinfiliz

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: @KBExit @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 we aim to display recent comments, likes, and other community metadata directly on the extension page

Great idea! This way, you won't have to jump between different links. Thank you for your hard work, Hüseyin

KBExit

Capybara @huseyinfiliz wasn't Ghosting, bro was cooking a whole buffet.

luceos

Looks very impressive!

huseyinfiliz 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.

How exactly is this going to work? Can we hook our own repositories into the flarum.org one?

huseyinfiliz The platform seamlessly blends data from GitHub and Packagist to build comprehensive extension detail pages.

Do you also sync data from other vcs providers, like GitLab.com, on-premise GitLab, Bitbucket, Gitee and OneDev?

Are you planning an API so that developers can build custom extensions or third party applications on top of the flarum.org data?

GreXXL

luceos How exactly is this going to work? Can we hook our own repositories into the flarum.org one?

We will propose some ideas once we have made up some proposals. We need some meta-data besides just repository information to display this properly and with context to the users.

luceos Do you also sync data from other vcs providers, like GitLab.com, on-premise GitLab, Bitbucket, Gitee and OneDev?

No. And we currently have no plan / use-case to do this. This is orientated for end-users to give them a good overview on what's available to them. Keeping it as simple as possible.

luceos Are you planning an API so that developers can build custom extensions or third party applications on top of the flarum.org data?

Not at this time. If there are use-cases for it this can be proposed and evaluated later. What we will eventually possibly will do is use the information in the extension-manager extension.

luceos

Thanks for the answers.

On the VCS point, I want to flag this for the roadmap rather than let it pass. The Zig project moved off GitHub to Codeberg late last year, explicitly because GitHub Actions became unreliable for their CI pipeline. The Free Software Foundation has an active campaign encouraging open source projects to follow. These are not edge cases. A platform that treats GitHub as the only source of truth will have blind spots for developers who have already made that move, and more will.

On premium extensions: good to hear that is on the horizon. When the time comes, happy to work toward getting Floxum extensions listed alongside the open source ones.

Why GitHub is losing FOSS trust

The slide has been accumulating across several fronts:

Uptime collapse — 94 incidents in 2023, 119 in 2024, 257 between May 2025 and April 2026 with 48 classified as major. GitHub Actions was the worst-hit service (57 outages in that period). GitHub's own CTO admitted the platform was not ready for AI-driven traffic growth and needed 30x more capacity.
Uptime dropped below 90% in 2025. The Zig project migrated to Codeberg, explicitly citing Actions hanging build servers for months with no fix.
Copilot trained on your code — In March 2026 GitHub changed policy to default to using Copilot interaction data for AI training. The community response: 59 thumbs-down, 3 rocket ships. A lawsuit over training data from open-source repositories (filed 2022) has survived partial dismissal.
Microsoft ownership anxieties — Growing concern over vendor lock-in and digital sovereignty, noted explicitly in the 2026 State of Open Source Report. Microsoft's acquisition created a slow but steady perception shift: GitHub went from a community-owned neutral platform to a commercial product with AI monetisation goals.
AI "slop" flooding repositories — AI-generated issues and PRs have flooded open-source projects. GitHub itself calls it a "DoS attack on human attention." The number of maintainers has not kept pace, and GitHub's own tooling (Copilot) is partly responsible.
Code quality pressure — Research shows Copilot correlates with more "mistake code" being pushed and less code reuse.

IanM

GreXXL luceos Do you also sync data from other vcs providers, like GitLab.com, on-premise GitLab, Bitbucket, Gitee and OneDev?

No. And we currently have no plan / use-case to do this. This is orientated for end-users to give them a good overview on what's available to them. Keeping it as simple as possible.

I also agree that supporting other VCS providers is a must , and should be a feature of the Flarum extension listings before it's released.

andrewjs18

hi @huseyinfiliz, this looks great!

the only critique I'd have is that the font color for the username/repo is hard to read below the extension name in day/light mode.

Impulsive5

This is a great contribution to Flarum.

When browsing extensions it is a little hard for me to read the vendor-name/package-name because the text is so light as others have said.

fakruzaruret

huseyinfiliz ı filtered 2.x on frontpage and tried to install change author extension but I could not. my forum version 2.0.0-rc.4 and php 8.4.22. the extension detail page also shows extension is not compatible with 2.x

huseyinfiliz

fakruzaruret The issue is probably caused by the filter on the Featured page not working correctly. I assume there is no issue on the All tab (not tested it yet)

Thanks for reporting it.