Hi. I have a website project in which they are interested in including a forum within the website itself. The “client” (some colleagues) has asked me to consider doing it with WP and the forum plugin. There is confidence to do it as I see fit and I would like to do it all with Sparkle.
I have been looking at free and open source tools for creating forums and have found Flarum. It seems a bit complicated to install but I think I could do it.
I am not familiar with Flarum, but the problem is modern web forums are relatively complex and self hosting them can end up being a full time job, might also be the case for Flarum.
I can suggest vanilla forums they are easy to install and manage plus it’s a lot more customizable and it’s written in PHP. I love Discourse and Flarum too but you need root SSH access to the server and a proper SMTP provider (as far as I remember). Google’s paid business email SMTP is pretty good. it comes in your plan I think. It’s like 6 bucks a month.
Vanilla’s download link is in their footer under Open Source but I’m leaving the link down below in case you need it.
I will look into it calmly and present it to the team.
My colleagues have the idea to make a private forum for internal discussions for the management of their project. They are looking to keep the threads accessible in one place but only to team members. So there is not going to be too much traffic and no need for large storage.
Hence the idea of using a free forum, easy to install and manage.
Again thanks for the heads up and the link to Vanilla. Indeed Discourse and Flarum require somewhat complex features and requirements.
Hi! So were you able to add Flarum forum to your site? As a newbie I am be very interested to see how to get Flarum to work with Sparkle. I would seriously want that feature on my site too.
Hello @feng , Flarum has some technical requirements that are not included in the hosting plan where the website is installed. It is important to check that.
The forum I need is for internal communication and that is why it is private, so many of the usual forum functions are not necessary.
In this case I have solved it with the PHP Forum Script | PHPJabbers which is very basic but enough to cover the needs of the project.
If you manage to install Flarum, it would be nice if you could comment it here. Cheer up with it!
Indeed Discourse and Flarum require somewhat complex features and requirements.