A few decades ago the prominent forums were run on top of vBulletin or Invision Power Board. These systems are still around today but they’re fairly clunky and cost a lot of money.
Flarum is a completely free alternative to PHP/MySQL forums. It’s meant to be a continuance to phpBB which is another type of forum software.
In its own words, Flarum aims to be:
- Fast and simple. No clutter, no bloat, no complex dependencies. Flarum is built with PHP so it’s quick and easy to deploy. The interface is powered by Mithril, a performant JavaScript framework with a tiny footprint.
- Beautiful and responsive. This is forum software for humans. Flarum is carefully designed to be consistent and intuitive across platforms, out-of-the-box.
- Powerful and extensible. Customize, extend, and integrate Flarum to suit your community. Flarum’s architecture is amazingly flexible, prioritizing comprehensive APIs and great documentation.
- Free and open. Flarum is released under the MIT license.
At this time Flarum is still in beta, however it’s garnered a lot of positive press from developers. Check out the growing list of features to see if this could be a good solution for your next project.
You can download Flarum right from the project homepage or from the GitHub repo.
Those who might want to learn more can visit the official community forums or follow the Twitter account @Flarum.
