Flarum is packed full of innovation, all wrapped up in a beautiful design.
This isn't just a nice skin. It's forum software reimagined.
Flarum looks and feels great out of the box. The user interface is streamlined so you can spend less time clicking and more time talking.
Quickly work your way through unread discussions, without having to go back to the discussion list or open dozens of tabs. Bring your mouse to the left side of the screen and the discussion list will conveniently appear.
Keep on scrolling, without having to wait for the next page of posts to load. Flarum lets you scrub anywhere in a discussion quickly and easily. It remembers your position if you come back after navigating away.
Read while you write. Flarum's reply form slides up from the bottom of the page, so you can scroll up to read posts – and even visit other discussions – while you draft your reply.
Flarum is fully responsive by default, and not just as an afterthought.
The interface has been optimized for touch, with big buttons, smooth animations, and gestures aplenty.
Swipe a discussion to the right to mark it as read. Swipe it to the left to bring up more controls. This webpage is on steroids.
Animations take advantage of hardware acceleration, so they're silky smooth and won't slow you down.
The desktop and mobile versions of Flarum use exactly the same templates. That means less work for developers, and a more consistent interface for users, no matter what size your device.
Flarum is lightning fast. The front-end is powered by a lightweight JavaScript framework called Mithril. It's slick, even on slower devices.
Not everyone has access to a speedy Internet connection. We've made sure Flarum's assets are as small as possible, so your users won't turn away because a page is taking too long to load.
Flarum is built by the developers of esoTalk and FluxBB, two of the fastest and lightest forum platforms around. We have a track record of taking performance seriously.
You shouldn't have to be a sysadmin to set up a forum.
Flarum takes 30 seconds to install, and anyone can do it.
Flarum is a simple PHP/MySQL application which runs great on any low-end shared host or VPS. Just upload the script and visit it in your web browser. That's it.
Coming soonOnce Flarum is stable, we plan to build importers so you can easily migrate your data from older forum software such as esoTalk, FluxBB, and more.
From day one, Flarum was made to be highly extensible. Make your forum work for you – not the other way around.
Comprehensive and well-documented APIs let you quickly and easily develop new functionality. Once stable, we'll follow SemVer, so you won't have to worry about your extensions breaking without warning.
Flarum's code is divided into distinct layers: A core domain, built with Laravel components; an API that conforms to the JSON-API spec; and a web application, built with a React-like JavaScript framework. Want to swap in a traditional PHP front-end? Build a native mobile app? All the power to you.
Make Flarum your own. Customise how your forum looks and feels without breaking a sweat.
Easily change the color scheme and upload a logo (coming soon). If you like darkness, there's a switch for that.
Want to do more? Flarum's stylesheets are written in Less, a CSS preprocessor. You can override variables to change many aspects of your forum's skin at once.
Never miss a post. Or a Like. Or a Mention. Flarum has first-class notifications out of the box.
Notifications are grouped by discussion and post to make them easier to process. They can be marked as read individually or all at once.
Pick and choose what you want to receive notifications for. You can opt-in to receive email alerts too.
Coming soonReceive daily or weekly digest emails with the best content you've missed. Subscribe to users and tags.
Organising discussions has never been simpler. In Flarum, the flexibility of tags meets the structure of categories and sub-forums.
Mention users and reply to specific posts to make the discussion flow. Linear discussion just got an added dimension.
Quickly reply to a specific post by typing the @ character. Flarum will list the most recent users and posts in the discussion.
Quote a post without cluttering up your reply. The username you're replying to will be displayed in your reply, and hovering over it will show a preview of the post's content.
Posts keep track of how many people have replied to them. You can see an overview of all the replies to a post without going anywhere.
Take control of your forum with fine-grained permissions.
Assign permissions per-tag for extra flexibility.
Search for discussions, posts, and users all in one place. More powerful search criteria coming soon.
Enable Pusher integration to have new posts and discussions appear as they happen. Self-hosted push coming soon.
Give your forum a strong presence on the web. Even though Flarum is a JavaScript application, it still serves up each page with search-engine optimised content in <noscript> tags.
Flarum's interface is fully translatable. We're working to ensure that every language gets first-class treatment with plurals, genderization, and more.
Stick discussions to the top of the list for users who haven't read them yet. Lock discussions so only moderators can post. Suspend misbehaving users.
Markdown, BBCode, and Emoji are supported out of the box, with a live preview. The formatting system is extensible too.
That's what we've done in the last eight months.
Here's what's in store for the next eight.
WordPress Integration
Anti-SPAM
Statistics
Keyboard Shortcuts
Single Sign-On
Private Discussions
Rewards & Reputation
Extension Marketplace
Importers
Easy Updates
Attachments
Answers
Toby Zerner
Franz Liedke
We're a couple of passionate open-source forum software developers. Forum software hasn't changed in a while, and we thought it was time for a fresh start. We're on a mission to make forum software you want to use.
Flarum is and always will be 100% free and open-source under the MIT license. Fork it on GitHub and help make it better.
Fork on GitHubHelp us pay for dedicated dev time and servers so that we can keep building. There's a lot to look forward to.
DonateRead the work-in-progress documentation and learn how to build extensions, themes, and language packs.
Read the docs