Flarum

Forums made simple. Modern, fast, and free!

Extensible

Elegant UI

Mobile First

Stylable

Fast & Light

Secure

Trusted

Localised into many languages with 41 translation packs

english
简体中文
german
french
Русский
turkish
italiano
spanish
indonesian
brazilian portuguese
romanian
swedish for flarum
sinhala
ukrainian
dutch
עברית
bahasa melayu
japanese
vietnamese
czech
正體中文語言包
hungarian
finnish
hindi
한국어
persian
tamil
traditional chinese (zh-hant-tw) language pack
greek
slovak
arabic
serbian
korean
croatian
azerbaijani
bosnian language pack for flarum core and multiple extensions
uzbekistan
thai
lithuanian
bangla
latvian

Showcase

DevNL

A perfect example of Flarum's customizability. This highly customised Dutch developer community has a unique layout, with beautiful elements like a custom loader. Created by the author of the popular SEO and Support Platform extensions.

Ten Digit Grid

An avid adventurer and hiker, Mike has found Flarum to be an excellent platform for blogging about his trips, discussing gear, and meeting fellow hiking enthusiasts while slowly increasing engagement.

Sunrise UPC LLC

Leading provider of communication and entertainment in Switzerland. Their Flarum community creates a framework for healthy togetherness while supporting their customers with an appealing, user-friendly community experience.

Blog

Edition 6 - Community Update

📖 Introduction

Welcome to our newest community update. As some time has passed since the last community update we want to give you an update on different things that happened or are happening in the future. In Edition 5 of our community updates 2022 we featured a overview about how to enable multi language support for Flarum communities. Feel free to skip back to this post in case you are interested. But now lets move on to our newest update.

🗣️ 20i FOSS Award

Like in previous years there is a FOSS award taking place also voting fot he best Community & Social platform. We would appreciate your support over at 20i (https://www.20i.com/foss-awards/category/community-and-social). Last year we had the honour of being the winner in this category - you can read more about that here: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/30334-20i-foss-awards-winner.
Besides this I also want to leave a link to slant for a more general rating and overview of Flarum with you: https://www.slant.co/topics/898/viewpoints/7/~best-web-forum-software-packages~flarum. Making more people aware of the capabilities of Flarum is one key element of keeping Open Source projects active and alive.

↗️ What's happening next?

We recently announced some big changes coming to secure the longevity and activity of the Flarum project. This both includes a merging of the FOSS software, plugin marketplace (Extiverse) and managed hosting (Blomstra) into one central platform. You can read all in detail here: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/32812-the-future-of-flarum-in-2023-balancing-open-source-and-success

▶️ Flarum 1.8

The next version - and last of the 1.X series of Flarum will be Version 1.8. It will include a number of bugfixes, improvements and also features - some of which derived from proposals (both as bounties and highest voted). You can see the upcoming changes in GitHub: https://github.com/flarum/framework/milestone/35.

⏩️ Version 2.0

After releasing 1.8 the active development of features for the 1.X release series will stop. You can read in the announcement also about the focus areas for the 2.0 release. This is backed by a generous grant that will ensure that there is high and active progress in the development. You can expect breaking changes in the 2.0 release - meaning that many extensions will need some form of refactoring before they work with the new release. Hence the major version bump.

🤦‍♂️ Spam is such a big issue?

We have seen many of you having issues with spam being forced upon your Flarum communities. Since our last update on the issue (https://discuss.flarum.org/d/29126-community-updates-092021) there has been even further development with extensions like Turnstile or Spam prevention to help community owners battle the problem. There is also an active bounty - that is still seeking money to be implemented - trying to improve the tools available once preventative measures have failed: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/31888-fixing-up-fof-spamblock/

🏴‍☠️ Active Bounties:

📰 Flarum.org Update

We have recently introduced Turnstile in order to help us fighting malicious accounts from being created. Also due to the upcoming changes to the Twitter API we are actively considering removing Twitter as a possible OAuth provider. You should therefor change over either to GitHub OAuth - or just use your mail and password to access flarum.org

🏁 Final words

We hope you have liked this edition of “Community Updates”. Looking forward to your comments and ideas for future updates. We are going to pickup speed again and hope to see you soon on the next edition of Community Updates.
20i FOSS Awards Winner! 🤟
Hosting company 20i has set up the event 20i FOSS awards to give extra awareness to self hosted, open source software packages like Flarum. Today the Foundation was contacted with the news that we have been nominated in the category Community and Social (https://www.20i.com/foss-awards/category/community-and-social)!
We're hoping all of you to vote on Flarum, because we all know which of the provided options in the category outruns the others by miles 😁 Winning such an award will boost our recognition!
Cast your vote at https://www.20i.com/foss-awards/category/community-and-social

20i Managing Director Lloyd Cobb commented "Free and open-source software is a vital part of our economy and the ability to express ourselves. The quality of this free software keeps hitting new heights. The 20i FOSS Awards are a wonderful way to recognize all the hard work that goes in to developing the tools we rely on so much."
The awards are open for voting between 8th - 31st March 2022, with the winners announced 12th April 2022. Visit https://www.20i.com/foss-awards to vote for your favourite open-source apps.
The Future of Flarum in 2023: Balancing Open Source and Success
Hello everyone,

2023 has become a year of change for Flarum.
But first, let me give you a drilldown of how we came to the Flarum of today, for those of you who are new.

Flarum up till now
On December 20th 2014, Flarum was open sourced, canceling a running fundraiser for a software as a service on Kickstarter in favor of making "better forums for everyone". Merging the efforts on Esotalk and FluxBB, Toby Zerner and Franz Liedke respectively combined their efforts to work on a fully open, lean and extensible community software under the Flarum name.
These two - with a team of zealous others - as the core team, spent their free time working on the early beta’s of a forum software impressing with fresh looks, extreme extensibility and a simple stack for small to corporate communities on shared and scalable hosting environments.
In 2019, the Flarum Foundation was set up to safeguard the open source nature of Flarum, protect its source code to the benefit of the community. Two years later the first stable version was released, a tremendous effort of people sacrificing their leisure time for the Flarum cause. Running into many issues with gaining sustainability for the project, early 2022 Blomstra was founded to answer the call for professional services in the ecosystem and invest back into the project unconditionally.
Progress on the Flarum project rest on the shoulders of a small group of people. Expectations, as such, are hard to meet with the amount of capacity we have. For this reason, attracting and retaining stable sources of income for the project have been a focus these past couple of years. And these efforts bear their fruits in 2023.
Flarum Commercial
Within the next couple of months we will unify many of the ecosystem portals into one central place for everything Flarum. In addition to the Flarum Foundation, to safeguard Flarum as a stable, maintained and healthily developed-on product, a commercial entity is incorporated that operates under the same name. This company is merging the Flarum website, Extiverse and Blomstra features and services into one new website for centralised information, news and services related to Flarum.
Other open source projects, like Zammad, GitLab, Vanilla and Discourse, have taken a similar approach with great success and managed Flarum hosting and custom Flarum development have shown to generate sufficient income to support some of our core developers. Pursuing this further, like others before us, will hopefully allow us to strengthen this approach and increase our hiring capacity for the future by making them more centrally available.
It's important to remember that Flarum will always remain open source and the new website will be transparent about this. For those who have already adopted Flarum or are new to it, nothing will change going forward.
You can take a peak at what’s in store for the new website at https://next.flarum.org (work in progress).

NLnet Grant
Our efforts to attract funding have, after several failed attempts, lead to the project now receiving a grant from NLnet. NLnet, having played a major role in the creation of the internet as we know today, is a foundation to stimulate network research and development in the domain of Internet technology. The application for a grant to build Flarum v2.0 with their help, has resulted in acquiring a total budget of 50.000 euro to work on the following topics:
  • Upgrading stale dependencies, like Laravel and Mithril;
  • Moving from Less to Sass in compiling stylesheets;
  • Support for search drivers in the backend;
  • Improvements to search in the frontend (ux/ui);
  • GDPR compliance;
  • Code splitting of auto-generated javascript files;
  • Tests for the frontend;
  • Theme design improvements;
  • Database drivers, like Postgres;
  • Plugin manager;
  • Improvements to the JSONAPI;
  • Security audit;
  • Accessibility audit;
  • Federation;
  • Automating community extension upgrades;
  • Email unsubscribing.
These items, part of our original application towards the grant, have been taken from our own roadmap and the list of community provided proposals.
As the grant is strictly provided towards the technical implementation of the 2.0 roadmap and participants are paid out directly by NLnet, we opted to split the budget between two people. This would improve the speed of development as reviews can be performed quickly and collaboration will be synchronized. I’m glad that Sami @SychO , as the lead developer of our project and Ian @ianm, as core developer and lead of the Friends of Flarum, have agreed to work under this arrangement effective immediately.
Although we still have to release v1.8 before starting work on v2.0, you can expect a lot of activity going forward. I hope to be able to keep you all in the loop of everything that is happening.
I am thrilled about 2023, all these things coming together is going to be a huge boost to Flarum and its adoption. I love to hear what you think, do leave a reply.
Flarum v1.7.0 Released

v1.7.0 - Tasmanian Devil


Tasmanian Devil

📣 The Release


Hey folks, the moment we've been waiting for is finally here! Flarum v1.7 is now live, and it's packed with some awesome new features and enhancements. Here are some highlights:
  • 👨‍💻 Introduced support for PHP 8.2!
  • 🚪 New access tokens user management UI.
  • 🔓 Added a global logout to clear all sessions, access tokens, email tokens, and password tokens.
  • 🛠️ Fixed notifications not being sent out on post approval.
  • 🔍 SEO improvements relating to document headers
  • 🧪 Created a Jest configuration package for frontend tests unit and component testing.
  • 🖌️ Improved tag text color contrast for accessibility.
  • 🚀 Introduced frontend extenders.
  • 🧰 Introduced PHPStan support for extensions through a new package.
  • 🔍 Admins can now search users in the admin users list.
  • 👥 Added display name column to admin users list.
  • 📄 Improved page navigation in the admin users list.
  • 🆗 Added UTF8 tag slug support.
  • 🔒️ Security patch.
  • 🧑‍💻 And much much more...

👨‍💻 For Developers


Extensions compatible with 1.6 should still operate on Flarum 1.7 without any changes. However, this release introduces some developer-facing changes, we recommend updating your code accordingly:
Additionally, this release comes with nice new features:
Checkout the full upgrade guide. Feel free to provide feedback or report any encountered issues!

⤴️ Upgrading


Before you upgrade, make sure to create a backup of your public/assets directory, your composer.json and your database!
Before starting the upgrade process, ensure you are on Flarum 1.0.0 or above in your Admin Dashboard or by typing php flarum info. If you're not, use the previous release announcement for upgrading from an earlier version.
To upgrade from 1.0 or 1.6 to 1.7, take a look at our upgrade guide documentation. The process should be much easier compared to previous major version upgrades, due to the lack of breaking changes.
If you run into any issues, please open a new discussion under the Support tag. Ignore similar discussions and open a new one anyhow. Make sure to mention the output of php flarum info, composer why-not flarum/core v1.7.0, and any errors to their fullest.

😇 Thanks to our Sponsors


Financial donations keep Flarum alive and kicking. The following companies and people deserve credit for making Flarum sustainable:
  • Glowing Blue AG
  • Sridhar Kamma
  • Nathan Sweet
  • Lincoln Russell
  • Bart van Bragt
  • Circuit Dojo
  • David Wheatley
  • Rad Web Hosting
  • Seaborn
  • Timotheus Pokorra
  • Pep Oliveras
  • Edmilerad
  • JrdnHnz
  • S4 Hosting
  • Alexander Skvortsov
  • Paulina
  • Jai Gupta
  • Guoqing
  • Miguel A. Lago
  • b0ring

Thank you to all the Supporters, backing us through Discuss:
@v17development and @waca !

Thanks for being awesome 😍 !

🙇‍♀️ Acknowledgements


Flarum wouldn't be the same without our over one hundred contributors, along with their generous time commitments! For this release we specifically thank these wonderful people:

🆘 Support the Project


We need your support to:
  • Guarantee continued development on the software.
  • Create a valuable ecosystem around the project.
  • Ensure healthy extensions are available.
You can support us:
For installation instructions check our installation documentation. If you are interested in developing extensions for Flarum, check the extend section there.
Staff Diary: v1.8 Cycle
With v1.7 out of the door and some v1.7.1 patches done, we now move on to v1.8, after a break 👼.
v1.8 will be dedicated to performance improvements and bug fixes and is very likely the last v1.x release before v2.0 development begins.
And as always, if you are interested in getting involved with Flarum: https://docs.flarum.org/#help-the-flarum-project

Developers

Extend

Learn how to harness the extensibility of Flarum to create your own extensions and customize your community.

EXTEND

Contribute

Help us make Flarum even more powerful and customizable! Every bug report, pull request, and documentation improvement is a huge help.

CONTRIBUTE

Built with the best tools

Have you ever changed tires with a spoon? Using the right tools for the job is key to success. We thank our technology partners for their generous product donations!