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/

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.

Karl

It's already indexing well on Google.

Jishnu

I'm also developing a plugin discovery system like this for my project, Magna - a simple headless cms for laraval with one click frontend.
I hope I can take some inspiration from this. 🫣

Charity

Very good, very good, this is exactly the place I was looking for

huseyinfiliz

Official Extension Discovery Beta — Update

It has been a little while since the launch of the Official Extension Discovery Beta, and I’m happy to share a major update with many improvements based on the feedback we’ve received so far.

What’s new?

Integrated data from flarum/abandoned-extensions into the marketplace.
Added new filter options to show forked, abandoned, and outdated extensions. These are now hidden by default from the extension lists.

Added a reverse order button to sorting options. For example, you can now reverse “Recently Updated” to browse extensions from oldest to newest.

Added replacement recommendations to abandoned extension detail pages, including a direct link to the recommended extension.

Added information to forked extension pages explaining that they are independently developed forks, with a link to the original project.
Improved text readability and contrast in the light theme.

Added filtering options to vendor pages.
Vendor pages now display:
- Total downloads across their extensions
- Combined GitHub stars
- Their latest activity, based on the most recent extension update
Completely redesigned the architecture behind vendor GitHub data synchronization and error handling. A new algorithm has been introduced to find the most up-to-date GitHub information even when multiple extensions belong to the same Packagist vendor.
Improved outdated-version detection with more advanced filtering to account for Flarum's beta releases. Extensions that were last updated during Flarum's beta period were sometimes incorrectly marked as outdated, so these releases are now handled appropriately.
Made several improvements to the Featured section, so you can continue discovering new and interesting extensions.

There are still many more features planned, but before adding too much more functionality, I want to make sure we have a solid and reliable foundation to build on.

Your feedback matters

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! 😄

The marketplace is still in beta, and finding edge cases, incorrect data, or unexpected behavior is extremely valuable at this stage.

One more thing: synchronization is still in progress

This update was only deployed recently, so the synchronization of all extensions has not finished yet.

There are a lot of extensions and GitHub/Packagist data to process, so the initial full synchronization may take around a week to complete. Some vendor, GitHub, download, or activity information may therefore look incomplete or outdated during this period.

Thanks everyone for testing, reporting issues, and helping shape the future of the official extension discovery experience! ❤️

Subarist

Maybe some fallback handling for extension icons when an icon URL is invalid or no longer available?

huseyinfiliz

Subarist Thank you for your suggestion. GitHub may be blocked in your region. Serving the images directly from the Flarum server should resolve this issue. I’ll look into it.

ClaudiusH

huseyinfiliz The > [!NOTE] markup in readmes is not formatted nicely, e.g. in https://next.flarum.org/extensions/fof/pwa
Shows in marketplace like this:

...but should look somewhat like

huseyinfiliz

ClaudiusH Thanks for pointing this out! I agree that the "> [!NOTE]" markup doesn't render very nicely in the marketplace.

I'll look into parsing these GitHub-style alerts and rendering them as proper Note blocks, similar to your example. This should make the README content much cleaner and more consistent in the marketplace.

By the way, it seems like you’ve already adopted the name "marketplace" I just called it that because I wasn’t sure what else to call it when introducing it 😄

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.