Quite some time had passed since there was an update about the FreeFlarum upgrade. Since then, the development server has improved a lot (https://freeflarum.dev), and I am happy to announce that an official release is just around the corner! You can read my last announcement about the dev server here, if you haven't seen it.
I have fixed lots of bugs that were present since my last post & introduced some exciting new features! First thing that you'll notice is that the main website now has a gallery of some featured and popular FreeFlarum forums. I got in touch with the owners of these forums, for permission to show an image of their forum on the main site. I believe that showcasing the great extensibility and modern & clean architecture of successful Flarum forums to people that might be new to it will encourage them to explore Flarum more and give FreeFlarum a chance to be the host that startups their communities.
Also, to prepare you for the update, I will leave a small changelog except here about all the swag that is "Coming Soon™":
- The FreeFlarum documentation will be completely revamped with latest information;
- Forum and extension updates will propagate faster over forums;
- Fixed lots of bugs (you can now re-register a destroyed forum) and improved HTTP security a lot (SSL, headers, etc...);
- You can export certain tables of your forum to CSV, for analysis (suggested by @orschiro);
- Exporting your data now includes the full data of your forum. Before, only avatars and database dump was included, but as more extensions started to use more assets, the export became incomplete. Now, the export will be a single
.tar.gz file which contains all extension assets (avatars, covers, FoF Uploads, etc...), your forum logo, favicon and full database dump. This makes sure that when you migrate out of FreeFlarum, your new forum will be identical to the old FreeFlarum counterpart;
- FreeFlarum will have 2 components - web and API, with Swagger UI. In a very short nutshell: you can authenticate to receive an access token that you can use to perform login-only requests remotely. All access tokens will be listed in your FreeFlarum settings and they can be revoked by a token with "elevated permissions", which is a token that is created when you login to FreeFlarum via its website (so remote logins won't be able to list access tokens, delete your account or revoke access tokens). You can choose to share a certain access token with a third-party hosting service, so that they can fetch your forum data and perform a seamless migration for you, which can possibly be done in a matter of minutes;
- Revamped donor perks and put some limits in place;
- FreeFlarum will be using unit tests internally during development (both for backend and frontend, from forum creation to custom domains and forum removal - so, at least 90 % coverage);
There's much, much more and this is maybe only like 25 % of it, but I will announce every change in a later post, after the update comes out. Now, I still have to fix some issues that prevent me from releasing the update at the moment (I don't want to release something that's incomplete or buggy, although I assume that I will still overlook something). You can click around at https://freeflarum.dev and give me some feedback, if you have the time to do so. And don't worry about breaking something, it's hosted on a separate sandbox server (note that this also means that forums that you create at the dev server won't be carried over to production, obviously - so please, use it just to test out the new features and for bug reports, not for serious forums!)
There is no ETA for the update yet, but I expect to migrate all forums somewhere in the middle of next week (so, expect a larger downtime then).
