Is there any API to communicate with Flarum from outside?

meglio

I'm from the Discourse forums world, where everything that you can do on the website, you can also do through a JSON API call. This is good for developing integrations with 3rd party software.

Could you advise if something similar is available with Flarum?

Berlyn

Discourse is build with API driven business logic controllers and SPA front end. Majority of the Flarum's base framework (Laravel) is done with controllers too, I'm not sure about API endpoints but an extension library may offer what you're looking to do in the short term until/if a full blown API is implemented.

Maybe @Toby can shed some more light on the topic.

Toby

Good news! Flarum is also a single-page application which consumes a JSON API. Pop open your browser's network inspector and see those API calls in all their glory! 💁

Pete

I'm also interested in this for a completely different CMS (ProcessWire). Having a JSON API will make this really nice and simple 🙂

Does the Flarum API go as far as creating/updating/deleting, or is it purely read-only? Or am I misunderstanding you Toby and everytthing in Flarum already runs on this API including posting new content?

meglio

This is nice. I'm the developer behind a WordPress plugin that helps integrate Discourse with WordPress. I would like to be an early adapter for Flarum->WordPress integration with using the same plugin!

With your permission, I'd write a series of illustrated tutorials in discuss.flarum.org, just like I did with at meta.discourse.org. Do you think it's a good idea?

And just because your application does also consume JSON API, it would be possible to use the same plugin to integrate with WordPress - at least in read-only mode to display Flarum stuff on WP pages.

Now, the question is - how stable the API is? If not so stable, do you have any number of APIs that are quite stable as by now and could be used for demos? So that my demos can last as reference for plugin users even with time after Flarum gets updates.

Franz

Pete Or am I misunderstanding you Toby and everytthing in Flarum already runs on this API including posting new content?

That. 🙂

Pete

Well that makes thing REALLY easy 🙂

Would it be possible therefore to write articles in a CMS and have Flarum in a container element at the end of the article for comments, loaded via AJAX (for cached pages) a bit like Disqus? Obviously you'd have a topic per article in that case but that's no big problem.

Franz

Yep, things like that are planned. (Or dreamed about.)

meglio

Custom CSS (optional, configurable, per-category or per-tag) for the first post to make it look more like an article would be also very good thing. This would allow us to use the forum as the only engine for both CMS and forum, at least for simple websites representings products, services etc.

Pete

meglio I think that if you can get the topic data as a JSON array before any formatting is applied then you can format it how you like so I suspect that functionality may already exist.

Kobaia

meglio Yes please, just a "first_post" CSS class would be great !

Toby

Will be possible with .PostStream-item[data-index="0"] 🙂

meglio

Are you sure data-index will always be present? "index" does not look very unique.

Berlyn

meglio How is index not unique? A discussion would always have a unique index and the first message of the discussion array, being PHP, should be 0 indexed.

Pete

The div container for Berlo's post above for example looks like this:

<div class="PostStream-item" data-index="13" data-time="2015-08-10T13:21:49.000Z" data-number="16" data-id="4243" style="display: block;">

so you can see his is the 14th post in this topic (arrays starting at zero) and the exact ID from the database is 4243 which I'm assuming is used for quoting across different topics, setting Likes etc.

Therefore data-index="0" will always be the first post in any topic.

meglio

I was not clear, sorry. I mean the word "index" is not so unique for a data attribute. Okay, if you say it's good to use that, then it's so

Pete

meglio I think it only needs to be unique in the application you're using/page you're viewing (it's not stored anywhere), and only if you're bootstrapping it for use inside another bit of software or some widget from Twitter (for examle) that could theoretically use the same attribute.

That's one of the reasons to target it by the element's class:

.PostStream-item ...

.PostStream-item[data-index="0"]

That class is reasonably unique to Flarum I think, especially when coupled to that data attribute. You could really make sure though by including a few parent classes in your CSS:

.DiscussionPage .container .DiscussionPage-stream .post-stream .PostStream-item[data-index="0"]

but that would probably be overkill 🙂

Short version: it's pretty safe to use this, yes, but I thought I'd rattle through some examples above in case by some fluke something has the same class names can cause an issue, no matter how unlikely that scenario is.