Hi everyone. I bit the entrepreneurial bug a while ago and am launching my venture soon. I have been researching and planning things for more than a year now. I always wanted to build a community alongside my core service offerings and wanted a responsive and modern forum software. An year and a half ago Discourse and NodeBB were the only meaningful opensource projects that seemed suitable for our project. Fast Forward to a month ago when the time had come for me to decide on the final software. I went with Discourse because it had progressed quite far and was quite stable. Installed it and we were testing it internally but it didn't feel very great for our usecase. I felt that the user interface and the user experience was not very great. Although I am thankful for the devs for making a great product which I am sure is and will continue enjoying success in the tech world.
I subconsciously started looking for alternatives. I had heard mention of Flarum by now but disliked Categories being labelled as Tags. Anyways I thought of using PHPBB with a theme because I really like Solus Project's Forums which were using PHPBB with a modern looking theme. I decided to give Flarum a try. Was skeptical because the devs keep repeating it shouldn't be used in production. Spun up a new VPS today at DO and managed to install it after a few hiccups. Let me just say Beta or Not, I am not going back. I just hope that when the software hits 0.1.0 we should be able to keep the data. I wouldn't mind paying a fee to the devs for setting up when the software finally hits stable just like Discourse help you out with community installs for 99$. Some issues I faced
1. Facebook OAUTH plugin is broken. Unless you comment the line 111 in the file vendor/league/oauth2-facebook/src/Provider/Facebook.php as mentioned in the thread https://discuss.flarum.org/d/4215-facebook-extension-issue it just doesn't not work.
2. The Installation guide should be a little more descriptive when it mentions the extensions that need to be installed alongside PHP-FPM. For Ubuntu it would be apt-get install php-curl php-gd php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-xml php-xmlrpc
3. Permissions for the folder in which Flarum is installed by the non-root should be fixed. this should be added to install guide
