host and marketplace

Blueh

hi, maybe it's too early to talk about this but I'm curious to know if you (flarum) will offer official host service and some kind of marketplace with officials addons and plugins.

I also think it would be fine make a list of verified extensions (checked and tested extensions)

: )

datitisev

Blueh A Flarum official host service was planned, but was suspended because of prioritizing making Flarum stable. Read more about it here.

Now, about the marketplace with official addons and plugins, well, Flarum comes with the official extensions, and that's it. Most of what makes Flarum great is that it's simple by nature, but can be extended. An extension that adds a marketplace is Bazaar by Flagrow

Blueh

I think it is important that the extensions be checked and verified, because many people interested in flarum, don't know programming and will not be able to solve bugs. On the other hand, I think it's fair that flarum gets a percentage of the sales of extensions (I do not know if it's allowed to sell extensions, but I'm assuming yes).

I used the host service and it worked correctly. I just hope prices are not exorbitant xD

datitisev

Blueh Flarum, at the moment, is open source, therefore free. I think it's planned to have some paid features later on, however it will not be necessary to pay to be able to use the forum.

clarkwinkelmann

Blueh it is important that the extensions be checked and verified

That's tricky - who do you trust to do this ?

Our two big developer groups (Flagrow and Reflar) have made a lot of extensions available and are constantly trying to improve them. If you trust us, you can consider all these extensions "verified".

Do you expect community-based verification for the extension you use ? Most of the extensions having a discussion on this forum, it's easy to see if people encounter major issues with them. Being open-source, you can also check their packagist downloads to see popularity and bug trackers to see the issue reports from the users.

Senpie

In all honesty, before anything else is done there should be an easy way to install/upgrade via a web panel without ssh.

luceos

Senpie In all honesty, before anything else is done there should be an easy way to install/upgrade via a web panel without ssh.

I'd love to hear of any issues you might have with Bazaar ?

datitisev

Senpie That's planned for stable. This is still beta software, after all.

Senpie

datitisev but that is so far away! ?

datitisev

Senpie Maybe so, maybe not. Every single little contribution helps that release date come closer.

luceos

I think there are several levels in play, from my perspective, when talking about verified:

Who is the developer? What are his credentials? Personally I don't consider this important.
Is it secure and safe, eg can the extension be hacked. This is a very difficult question. One of the biggest paid photo gallery sliders on Wordpress had a vulnerability that allowed anyone to see the database credentials stored in the config.php up till version 4.*. How responsive you are as a developer and how updates are pushed to the webmasters is far more important.
Is the quality good? Quality is often an indication of how easy it is to maintain it.

I was actually considering some kind of reviewing functionality for Bazaar, it's just a matter of time before we implement it I guess.

luceos

luceos I was actually considering some kind of reviewing functionality for Bazaar, it's just a matter of time before we implement it I guess.

I started on this today for Bazaar.

Blueh flarum version compatible,

Bazaar and flagrow.io already know compatibility of extensions to some extent. As such results in Bazaar are filtered based on the Flarum version you use.
As the aforementioned reviewing functionality is done it will allow finetuning the results and bringing a better experience al together.

Blueh number of downloads

This is also already available, but only from flagrow.io. Bazaar does not show this information yet.

Blueh author

Both Bazaar and flagrow.io show this information. Clicking on the author on flagrow.io even allows you to search for all known extensions of that author.

Blueh rank (or score)

This will be part of the reviewing functionality I started with today. But you are already able to favorite and a list of extensions sorted by amount of favorites is on the homepage of flagrow.io.

Blueh a link to the discussion (thread in forum)

I've considered the same a while ago: flagrow/bazaar59

Blueh some screenshots

Our designer Darjan has actually designed an extension detail page. At some point we hope to allow other developers to join in on the marketplace and enrich the pages about their extensions the way they want.

Flagrow.io and Bazaar will also allow for paid extensions in the near future. @clarkwinkelmann is already putting effort into completing this functionality.

A feature I finished yesterday identifies the extensions installed on all of your Flarum installations and will be able to notify you about available updates. This status information, of course, is also available from the flagrow.io dashboard.

I'm sorry if this thread is becoming more of an explanation of Bazaars roadmap ? That is not my intention.

Blueh

I understand the idea of a developer-free community but, I think would be good a directory with all extensions with the flarum version that supports it and a verification, why? I don't know anything about programming and the idea of a cheating extension scares me a little, for example something that exposes the security ?

on the other hand, if someone is selling an extension, if someone is generating profits from something he got in principle for free, I think it's right if flarum take a part of that profit.

luceos

Blueh if someone is selling an extension, if someone is generating profits from something he got in principle for free, I think it's right if flarum take a part of that profit

Remember that even though extension developers can use Flarum for free, they invest countless hours building one or more extensions to the benefit of others and Flarum in general. With Flarum this is even more the case as default functionality is limited.

Demanding a share of profits from paid third-party extensions therefore I feel is injustice.

There are plenty other ways for the core team to earn money with all this. Several of these have been proposed time and time again, like patreon. One of these is PayPal donations, which seems to bring in something already.

Apologies for brevity. On mobile.

ganuonglachanh

This is an interesting topic, I developed some extension for flarum, some are open source and some are private use only. I don't know how to make money from flarum. It is just a freetime hobby for now ?

Does any paid extension in the market place?

Blueh

I think is a good plan to do a different section to publish and download extensions, with important information like: flarum version compatible, date, last update, author, number of downloads, rank (or score) and some screenshots, and a link to the discussion (thread in forum). I have in mind something similar to "resources" section in xenforo.

Blueh

so is bazaar an extension that shows all extension availables? but, where is it taking that information from? flagrow database?

jordanjay29

Blueh It takes the information from a database built at flarum.today, which scrapes packagist.org looking for properly-annotated Flarum packages.

luceos

jordanjay29 not quite. Flagrow.io does the same thing as flarum.today, but it does not depend on it. ?

And it doesn't scrape packagist, but uses it's api.