tobyzerner

It's buggy, prone to spam, probably not secure, missing features, etc. Probably should've named it an alpha, almost. But if you're game you could give it a spin - we're running our support forum on it currently. Will fill out that roadmap tomorrow :)

Thanks! Technology stack is PHP, JavaScript (Mithril), Less. More info here: http://flarum.org/docs/extend/

Just made one: https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/274

Mind reporting an issue for this? (https://github.com/flarum/core/issues) I can't test directly because I'm using a Mac, but it would be great if we can continue investigating on GitHub :)

This is something we haven't tackled yet, but we definitely want to make this kind of thing easy at some point in the future.

Thanks for the feedback!

1. Fixed.

2. https://github.com/flarum/tags/issues/10

4. Haha, I don't want to pay for Pusher right now. Will be working on a self-hosted push solution soon.

6. https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/115

Fair points. I guess I consider esoTalk to be somewhat of a lost cause in terms of the way it's built. It's a pain to implement fixes and features, maintain, and is pretty limited in what it can do (and how it can be extended). Simply put, I didn't enjoy working on it.

When I said "I have produced some low-quality code and APIs that will surely need revision", I'm mostly talking about more semantic things like class naming and organization. The majority of Flarum's architecture is very solid, testable, and will be easy to maintain. Doesn't compare to esoTalk.

Admittedly, if I just wanted to start a business and make some cash, you're right: I probably could've just persisted with esoTalk. But it's not all about money – it's also about doing the best work that I can, enjoying it, and making damn good forum software with great potential.

There will eventually be a migration path from esoTalk to Flarum, and I still merge PRs from time to time... so I like to think I'm not completely abandoning the esoTalk folk!

Flarum automatically redirects to the non-JS version if there's an error booting up the JS app. What browser are you using?

We built Flarum to be highly extensible, so something like this could easily be implemented! Eventually we'll probably make an official Q&A extension too. If you want to learn more about Flarum's extensibility, check out http://flarum.org/docs/extend/.

On the other hand, Flarum has a fully-functional JSON API which can fulfill some of those use cases. See http://flarum.org/docs/api for more info - and you can see it in action at http://discuss.flarum.org/api/discussions.

We output a copy of the page's data within <noscript> tags. (e.g. http://discuss.flarum.org/?nojs=1) Admittedly it's currently pretty bare-bones and not actually very optimized, haha

It doesn't at the moment! D: That's something we plan to address very soon though. Not sure what specific strategies we'll implement – will sit down and nut it out in the next week or two. https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/271

Can I ask specifically what you don't like about the direction Discourse/Flarum are taking?

I can't hope to compete with Discourse on features (yet!), but I think Flarum's elegance sets it apart. Out of the box, it's pretty, fast, easy to use, and works beautifully on mobile. And it's written in PHP, so is super easy to install – any low-end shared host will do.

Thanks! The compiled source (http://flarum.org/download) should run on shared hosting no problems. The bash scripts are only for building that ZIP that we put up for download, and setting up a Vagrant development environment. See http://flarum.org/docs/contributing for more info.

The JS framework change (Ember to Mithril) was a great decision for us, especially given our focus on being fast and lightweight. The codebase ended up being far simpler too. I've been meaning to write a blog post about all the details!

Beyond stability and more features, I hope to set up some services around Flarum later this year – an extension marketplace being the first. In order for Flarum to succeed, building a great ecosystem is a must.