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Flarum, a modern PHP forum platform

Forum software is a cornerstone of communications on the web. There are numerous of open forums around and also a lot more that are hidden form plain sight. Many of these are powered by PHP and are facing the same challenges as CMSes an ageing codebase. Flarum is a fresh option for forum applications.

There are stacks and stacks of forum applications written in PHP such as Simple Machine Forums and PHPBB. The latter decided as early as 2010 to embrace the Symfony2 framework, but this effort proved to be a large undertaking and has altered to deploying components and not the whole stack. This shows how big an effort it is to move a popular applications a certain direction.

In the meanwhile there have been new contenders such as Discourse (written in Ruby, not PHP) setting a new standard for usability, integration and authentication. Flarum is a modern option in the world of PHP forum software. It's written with Laravel compontents and is a combined successor of esoTalk and FluxBB projects.

Flarum is contemporary and feature complete, here are a few highlights:

  • Fast and simple
  • Touch enabled and responsive
  • Customizable and extensible
  • Fine-grained permissions system
  • A front end built with Mithril.js
  • Open Source (MIT licensed)

The software is still in beta phase. Learn more:

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Thursday November 12, 2015
Permalink - Tags: php, flarum, laravel

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