Show HN: Natika – Simple PHP Forum for Developers
github.com
github.com
It looks really pleasing. I especially like that it doesn't give too much space to display avatar and user information such as join date, user category, posts and so on like many traditional forums that always used more vertical space than many one or two sentence replies, eating up vertical space.
It's excellent that there's no visual noise of taglines, statuses, achievements and other crap like that, though.
Above each of the forum topic spaces, you would not.
But on the home page? Absolutely.
A lot of forums, especially the small and medium ones, do not have any other software running than the forum. There is no blog, no shop, no nothing... just the forum software for the community to use.
For them to be able to present a home page that communicates clearly and quickly to visitors what the site is about is a boon.
It's one of the things I regret not putting into Microcosm from the outset.
For example here is a cycle club using the forum we wrote: http://forum.islington.cc/ and because we only gave them the forum bit, they went and created a static page elsewhere to act as the home page: http://www.islington.cc/
If we had done a better job at allowing branding and communication on the home page, that would've avoided them needing to create a second thing... and reduced friction with more function would have helped us both.
This feels to me like one of those "what I (the techie) think they want" vs "what they (the community owner and customer) think they want"... the hero unit is actually a good place in between the two.
Oh, and it's worth me mentioning that Microcosm failed ( https://microco.sm/ ), that story is here: https://medium.com/tech-london/the-journey-of-a-london-start... yet the software still exists on Github, and the number of sites and users on my personal instance continues growing (over 300 sites, over 70k users) with the largest single site being https://www.lfgss.com/ .
What Natika will learn is that it's hard to build new communities on a new platform, and that it's hard to migrate existing ones. I with them luck.
I mean, it's a forum script. It seems like it does a decent enough job as a forum script. But the amount of competition is this market is enormous, and you're sort of competing with names that have hundreds of thousands of sites using them along with large developer communities and lots of styling options.
If I was a developer wanting a forum on its own, then I'd probably check out XenForo or IPB or Woltlab (paid) or MyBB or SMF or phpBB (free) before this, because I know I'd find more help and documentation online and be assured that development would continue for the foreseeable future.
If I wanted to integrate it with another script, I'd use a forum plugin for the script, like BBPress, or Kunena.
If I wanted a modern, 'hip', looking forum, it'd be something like NodeBB or (maybe) Discourse.
The forum market is so crowded at this point that you need a bit of a gimmick or hook here. Simple and aimed at developers seems like it could work, but I don't see much that suggests either in the screenshots or demo. Does it have a well designed and documented API for extending the script and what not? Does it let you remove or add features you don't/do want without writing code? Is it easy to integrate into an existing site?
That's the sort of thing you need to have if you want it to be a forum script for developers, and unfortunately, I don't see much evidence of that.
PHP options are notorious for lack of API documentation for developers and inventing their own in-house frameworks despite solid ecosystem of ready solutions and libraries, or in case of solutions actually using those, burying them behind layers of their own boilerplate to make sure none of it is available to third-party developers (phpBB3 and XenForo, I am looking at you).
> development would continue for the foreseeable future
Like how XenForo's development froze for year and a half with zero word from its developers because of ongoing litigation, or SMF's foundation losing majority of contributors every few releases due to internal arguments with self-proclaimed project lead? Or Invision Power Board thats so busy churning out new features I remember having bugs in 3.1 that they didn't fix for 8 years and were actually moved over to next major?
> The forum market is so crowded at this point that you need a bit of a gimmick or hook here
As forum software dev I can tell you that there's massive sunction from developers for software that meets following criteria:
- powered by known frameworks and libraries - exposing as much API as possible from those frameworks and libraries - architectured to be maintainable despite heavy customizations (this means that if I use forum software based on eg. Symfony, I still should be able to use it as framework to build complete site around) - embrancing technologies and services from outside AMP stack (like search engines, build steps for frontend's assets)
Not that it would be even possible to run non-PHP server side scripts with majority of said providers...
FWIW I chose discourse as my last forum software because it's written in technologies I prefer, ruby/postgres.
Even though I prefer the UI elements of xenforo or Invision PowerBoard- I can't ever go back to using mysql after administering oracle, mssql and postgres.
MySQL is the mongodb of relational database design.
And PHP is the equivalent in scripting languages, unfortunately.
Edit;
I wasn't clear apparently, I was saying while I like the configuration system, I do not like the UI, or the UI trend and I additionally do not like to tie in with mysql, we should be deprecating mysql from personal things so that in 10 years business can follow.
>MySQL is the mongodb of relational database design
Care stating why?
But as an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgJtr9tIME MySQL vs PostgreSQL - Why you shouldn't use MySQL
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/glossary.html#glos_a...
http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else
https://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/12/28/terrible-choices-mysql/
the fact that https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-real-escape-st... has to exist because https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-escape-string.... doesn't work properly. (this is actually blamed on PHP a lot)
My favorite MySQL gotcha is that if you issue a GRANT statement with a typo in the user's name instead giving a "user does not exist" error it simply creates a new user with the misspelled name.
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