Chances an inexperienced person can installl and manage Flarum?

bbuddies

My New Years goal is to learn to code. I’ve decided to build a forum to keep myself motivated on this goal. After some research, I’ve decided on Flarum, but it doesn’t look like a great choice for a beginner.

I have friends who can help, and I don’t mind messing up until I figure things out. But, will I even be able to get this installed without harassing you good people in this support category too much?

I don’t mind some challenges - I’m actually hoping those will help me learn faster. I’m a true beginner, going through the W3School trainings currently. Besides that I took an html class in 1996, lol.

foros

You need to know how to install wordpress and others content delivery network too..
Javascript is super important, maybe you can start with that

bbuddies

foros I’m working through the SQL tutorials as I thought I’d Ben building from scratch. I’ll finish the tutorials this week and then checkout JavaScript.

Do one-click WP installs count? ?

foros

bbuddies SQL tutorials

Excelent!
Yes, in wordpress the most important are the themes, some css and javascript

webeindustry

Hi there. I'm 35 and started down the road of learning software development just a few months ago.

The difficulty to install this forum will depend on your background. On the whole it's relatively painless, but for someone who doesn't have experience with a terminal getting anything done can feel a chore in the beginning.

Are you sure you want a forum and not a blog? Often times people who start down software development will blog about their journey.

As for software development, have you given consideration as to which platform you'd like to work with? I assume you're looking into web development as you're checking out HTML, but just wanted to make sure. My first 6 weeks sent me scattered from one language to the next until I decided on mobile app development. I've now focused in on Java and Android SDK, and Golang for API.

It's a long journey but very rewarding as you see your creations come to life. Best of luck to you!

bbuddies

webeindustry

webeindustry thanks. I manage marketing at a small tech company. Our software is built with PHP, so I’m leaning towards that.

I chose a forum because there are a few that I visit regularly. They each have some cool features, and I thought that trying to build my own from scratch would be a fun project to help me learn. I decided it may be better to take an existing tool like Flarum and tweak it to do the things I want, rather than start from nothing. It may be a dumb idea or too big a task, we’ll see. But, I know that reading those tutorials and memorizing words would get old real fast.

webeindustry

bbuddies

Cool. Yea building a forum without any prior experience would likely be a source of immense frustration ultimately leading to burnout. It's better to have big ideas in mind, but start small with simple projects and slowly build knowledge that lends towards creating your big ideas in time.

The tutorials and "everyone can code" simple lessons are very boring. You're right about that. I've tried numerous times to just go for it and jump into my own projects, but unfortunately keep coming back towards the basics. In my own case it appears to be taking steps like 1,2,4,7,13.... 1,2,3,4,5,9,15.... 2,3,5,7,12,18.... 3,4,5,6,8,14.... the trend is upward, but not at all linear. YMMV

jordanjay29

bbuddies I'm going to take off the Flarum Community Manager hat here and suggest you might want to look at other forums first. Flarum isn't hard to install and manage (unless you run into issues) but it's beta status means that not all the cool features you might expect from a forum are here yet. Something more fully fledged might work better for your first community, it really depends on what the priority is for the site you're bulding.

For community and discussion features, Flarum is wonderful. For bells and whistles, Flarum still has some ways to go. Other forum softwares, like SMF or vBulletin are more mature in this respect. And if you ever want to migrate down the road to Flarum it should be possible.

bbuddies

jordanjay29 thanks, I appreciate the honesty. I just created an account at FreeFlarum and I’m testing it out. I love the look, the flow of conversations, and the roadmap. I’m not a big fan of the lack of features, but I understand it’s in beta.

I’m not too interested in creating a community. It’s more of a pet project to keep me motovated. The chance to try and customize this to do the things my favorite forums are missing is the goal. But, the more I read about coding in general, the more overwhelming it all seems. Not that I can’t do it, but it’s gonna take a little longer than 2 weeks of reading before I can do what I want.

I may install Flarum on one domain and start building my own forum from scratch on another. I’ve found a tutorial that walks through how to setup the database, and I think the practice of going through that will help a ton. That forum will suck, but it’ll give me a playground to test things. When I’m feeling brave, I may try creating a simple extension for my Flarum site.