Community Update - 2016 Year in Review

itsjtaM

Thank you for taking the time to update us all @jordanjay29

Pilvinen

All right. Nice. A lot of technical behind the scenes stuff going on.

But I'd like to remind you that from site administrator's perspective (hello) Flarum would be pretty much production ready (sans possible security considerations that I'm not aware of) if it had at least:

User management page.
Ability to move posts to new threads.
Ability to split post to a new thread.
Ability to select several posts and do stuff to them all. ie. "delete, move, etc"
Ability to select several threads at once and do stuff to them (mostly "delete" in case of spam)

jordanjay29

Pilvinen User management page.

This exists and works with the latest version.

Pilvinen Ability to split post to a new thread.

This exists and works with the latest version.

All the rest are good points, and we're certainly hoping to get to many of them. Getting to a stable API will also allow the community to more reliably fill in the gaps (since the platform they're developing for will not be significantly changing for a while).

miguel2

Pilvinen Solo es un ejemplo Editado

marcozambi

Pilvinen I second ALL of your discussions/messages management feature requests, which are necessary for good maintenance of a forum.
I and my group see a lot of potential in Flarum, and we're just waiting for the first release to be out in the wild to plan our porting from SMF2

Pilvinen

jordanjay29

jordanjay29 Pilvinen Ability to split post to a new thread.

This exists and works with the latest version.

This, exactly, is the problem with every other open source project which takes the modular approach thinking "we provide the essentials and the users will add missing functionality with plugins" - a very large % of the user made plugins don't work and are not supported anymore "but hey, maybe someone will fork it and fix it, one day" - what if I need it now and don't have to skills the code it myself? This is not just about the software being in alpha/beta it's a fundamental issue with the development model and it's not going to go away, ever.

I've had this exact same problem with various other open source forum softwares which use the same model. Updates break stuff and people who used to be active with their plugins disappear and the vast majority of end users don't even notice - why? Because they don't keep their forums up-to-date, it's working right? So why update it. So this in turn builds an atmosphere where there is no incentive to make a coordinated group effort to fix things because "hey, the plugin is working just fine with the version I'm running"

It's very annoying for the end user who just wants a forum that works.

My suggestion would be to use the modular design but support as much features as you possibly can with official plugins which will always have maintainers as long as the project exists.

It's perfectly fine that the users can play around and build their own little plugins - but oh man! Seriously. Don't leave anything important or essential for the community "someone will make that". Because it doesn't work in the long run.

IDVert3X

I would really like to see private messages, image upload and text formatting done.
These are the functions that I really miss and I think every forums software should have them.
I understand that Flarum tries to be modular, but this really is a basic functionality which should be there as a core function. At least the private messages.

Sure, we have file upload extension, but it has terrible validation and no file management when posts get deleted/edited. Even worse: there is no information for the user about the file upload status.

Text formatting is also there as an extension, but it isn't really the best looking one.

Private messages are totally missing.

Flarum is really nice piece of software and I like it, but it looks like the development is extremely slow. Maybe I will learn Mithril ( oh, I hate JS so much ), get familiar with your code ( from what I've seen so far, it feels really good for a PHP code! ) and try to contribute ?

Anyway, thanks for your awesome work guys, keep it up!

jordanjay29

IDVert3X Any contributions are welcome. And most extensions are flexible enough for you to submit pull requests or fork it to make your own.

staion

miguel2 please write in English

Prosperous

Great write up and I'm confident we will definitely see a stable release this year. Keep up the great work guys and as always, stay focused and positive! ?

Franz

Pilvinen Things will break during beta. Once the stable version is released, we will have certain guarantees about the stability of our public APIs. When extension developers stick to those, their extensions will work with all releases of a major version.

Prosperous

I'm not saying I don't like extensions or anything along those lines but there are some points I tend to agree with from @Pilvinen's post. I have mentioned it before but I am a big fan of 'out-of-the-box' extensions especially when it comes to the more expected features like private messages and topic/discussion moderator tools. In saying that, I much prefer the developers concentrate on getting this piece of kit to stable before anything else and I believe it has been said before as well in numerous other topics.

At the end of the day we just have to go about things in priority, and I believe that the core software is their priority. Let's wait for that before putting through requests about features and things we may want and/or need for our communities. ?

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