Replacement for the old forum software

[tom--]

PHP BB apps from the early 00s like IPB still work but are clunky and lack modern features. If we want more people taking part, which we should, then we should consider alternatives.

I'll begin by suggesting Discourse. I use it at New Relic and like it a lot. It has an impressive feature list, a good pedigree and some serious sites and projects have committed to it so I think it's going to be around for a while. It spent a long time in beta while Atwood obeyed his own Rule of Three so I think it's mature enough for Yii. It's written in ruby but at least that means it's not written using Laravel 8P

[samdark]

I'm for replacing IPB (it's not phpbb). Not sure with what exactly though. Discourse is a cool thing but, it's something we totally can't hack well. My Ruby sucks :)

[samdark]

I wonder if there's anything that integrates well with GitHub, is markdown-powered and has decent editor such as http://codemirror.net/mode/gfm/...

[jacmoe]

Would be ironic if we switched to flarum.org - powered by Laravel, but really awesome, at least once it's out of beta. What is the forum software behind devmaster.net - it is similar in that it is based on tags and not fora.

[cebe]

What is the forum software behind devmaster.net - it is similar in that it is based on tags and not fora.

http://forum.devmaster.net/ is a discourse.

[cebe]

note that discourse has an entry page like this: http://forum.devmaster.net/categories which is more forum like and I would prefer that as the default page.

[cebe]

Discourse is a cool thing but, it's something we totally can't hack well. My Ruby sucks :)

I think we should focus on features here and not on technology. If Discourse fits all the needs we find a way to adjust and host it. At least it has a great opensource spirit and has a ton of usefule features + it is stable enough (compared to flarum for example).

[jacmoe]

To be honest, it is easier to hack on Ruby since Yii is borrowing a lot of ideas from it (ROR) - at least hacking on the views is not out of our reach I think. There must a lot of people who are integrating it cross language.

[mdomba]

I heard all good reviews about vanilla forum but apart from installing it can't find time to test it:

http://vanillaforums.org/
https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla

the recent version 2 was written with a new micro PHP framework called garden (still hasn't an official page) but it's author has some blog posts about it - http://markosullivan.ca/garden-preview-part-i/

But

I think it would be easier to stick to IPB. The current version is not lacking any modern feature, the thing is that we don't have the latest version installed and IMO it would be easier to transfer the current DB to the new version than to a new forum software.

[jacmoe]

I don't agree that Yii should "stick with" anything if there are better alternatives.
I am not too fond of Vanilla and I'd rather that it was going to be Discourse.
I personally didn't like the way it was set up and IIRC you had to hack and install lots of addons to make it usable.
That might have changed, but a visit to the official Vanilla community does not convince me.
I feel that Discourse has a more coherent solution out of the box.

I think that one of the greatest things about Yii is the community - and I think that it deserves the best. :)
Even if it's in Ruby.
(I have checked the Discourse code and it seems to be nicely written standard RoR).

[jacmoe]

I will install and test Vanilla - it has been five years since I tried it.
And perhaps, if it turns out to be a fitting choice for the Yii community, I could help theming it.

[jacmoe]

Vanilla has absolutely no batteries included, and you even have install a lightbulb as well. :)

What it does have, is a Bootstrap addon that would make it easy to theme it.

Vanilla went for composer just about a month ago, so the master is easy to include as a composer package and a proper Vanilla module could be made.

I agree with @mdomba that a switch from IPB is only warranted if the new forum software kicks some serious backside.
So, let's see.

No doubt that Discourse is above Vanilla in terms of professionalism, but I have a feeling that it will be more satisfying to have something that can be hacked on easily, and directly embedded via a Yii module.

[slaFFik]

http://flarum.org/ ?
https://github.com/flarum/flarum

[jacmoe]

We are tempted, but Flarum is not out of alpha/beta yet and it is written using Laravel ! :p
Still, it looks and feels stunning.
But it won't be ready for such an extensive multi-cultural community like the Yii community.
Even Vanilla, if my calculations are correct, would require at least 20 addon packages to accommodate for translations, media handling, file upload and user profile stuff. ;)

[jacmoe]

First impression after installing Vanilla:
Not as bad as I thought.
The 'vanilla' package (pun definitely intended) contains 21 plugins that you can enable/disable and configure at will. I enabled 15 of those.
Should take care of the basic needs and match the functionality of IPB.
Then all the different language addons needs to be installed.

It is up at http://testing.jacmoe.dk/ - you can register (hopefully) and then I will add you as admins as I see fit so that you can get a feel for how Vanilla is like in practice.

The data transporter supports IP Board 3, that is hopefully the current software?

In the mean time I will probably spend some time tweaking it and start working on a theme using the Bootstrap addon (of course).

Sphinx search is supported by an addon, but I am not sure if one exist for Elastic.

[jacmoe]

Without installing any additional stuff, I am quite pleased:

Yes, I pasted that code directly into the editor, which I have configured to use Markdown by default.
You can quote and mention people - that editor is not bad.

[tom--]

I'm not very familiar with vanilla but a quick look at their "showcase" shows a lot of sites that look like old PHP forums from the early 00s.

[tom--]

As far as Flarum goes, we simply have to port it to Yii.

[Forin]

What about the old forum, in particular yii2? Close and convert existing topics? Or lose existing contents?

In my opinion invisionpower is ok.
If you ever want to make money from professional paid support, you could use the commerce extension: https://www.invisionpower.com/features/apps#commerce

Theres a build support desk which handles billing, member group promotion and renewals, automatically.

If you choose another forum, I think this is a must have, maybe not now, but in the near future.

[jacmoe]

Vanilla surprised me, to be honest.
Just took a test drive and it already has what IPB has, and it does it better.
Especially the editor!

The looks can be changed easily and all the current discussions can be transferred to it - so no lost discussions and no broken links.

[tom--]

@Forin I suggest keeping the old IPB in read-only form and at the old URL so that google indexes etc. all remain.

[tom--]

@jacmoe IPB with a better editor isn't really a step into the 2010s.

[jacmoe]

Professional, paid support is probably best done in a separate forum installation, IMO.

@tom-- there are in depth instructions at Vanilla about how to ensure that you don't lose search traffic due to broken links. :)

I didn't say that Vanilla was IPB with a better editor.
IPB is horrible in my humble opinion :)

What I said was that Vanilla is already much better totally out of the box and not configured/massaged to meet your needs.
And that is not bad.
Pretty close to Discourse - not there, but very close.

[jacmoe]

I agree with @samdark that we probably would be most happy with a forum written in PHP that we can hack on with confidence :)

[tom--]

I disagree with @samdark because there are better ways to spend time than hacking forum software. If it were up to me, I'd be looking for something to use rather than modify.

[jacmoe]

This is under discussion @tom-- so I expect us to discuss, not fight.
A discussion for me is not about who's right and who's wrong - it's all about exchanging ideas, to shed new light on old subjects and to go forward, and perhaps even change our minds.
I was only lukewarm towards Vanilla when this topic started, now I am beginning to see that it might be better for us to be running a forum written in a language that we grok - regardless of whether or not we're actually going to hack on it or not.
That does not mean that I think that Discourse is garbage.
My world is rarely black and white.

[rugabarbo]

http://www.discourse.org - modern, free
https://xenforo.com - secure, stable, but non-free

IPB sucks. It was good, when it was being supported by authors of XenForo (:
vBulletin sucks. It was good, when it was being supported by authors of XenForo (:

[mdomba]

I wonder if all of you that wrote for IPB that sucks if you are commenting the current yii forum version?
Because that is an old version (3.1) and IPB is out with a new version (4) and new features...

IMO IPB has a very good suport / admin section but if you don't install a local copy you can't see that part of it.

btw. here is a nice comparison of IPB and XF - https://theadminzone.com/threads/xenforo-vs-ipb-review-with-pretty-pics.117908/

[jacmoe]

It was basically me promoting NodeBB and @cebe who promoted Discourse - and now I think both Carsten and me are pro-Discourse.

Regarding phpBB, Discourse people recommend that it is used as intermediary between unsupported (like our current) software and Discourse for imports.

[samdark]

There's importer for IPB3: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/script/import_scripts/ipboard3.rb and for phpbb it's known to be very buggy. Discourse sounds OK to me.

[itma]

Guys, maybe it was mentioned before - remember about url mapping because of the SEO. We can't lose all the indexed content and wait for the new to be indexed. A lot of people are searching through Google (mainly), so mapping urls with 301 redirection could work in that case.

[cebe]

@itma sure, we have put a focus on that for all site content before, so we'll also do that for the forum.

[cebe]

It was basically me promoting NodeBB and @cebe who promoted Discourse - and now I think both Carsten and me are pro-Discourse.

From a feature point of view I see NodeBB and Discourse are very close up so I would be fine with either of them.

There are some technical concerns I have about this:

• NodeBB is "built on either a Redis or MongoDB database" - https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/master/README.md
  I do not think redis fits well as a storage engine for a forum, and I am not familiar with mongoDB at all.
• Discourse ships as a docker container, that means I need to run docker in production which I have had quite some problems with in the past.

So as none are preferable because of their technical stack, I'd like to setup both and go with the one that works out better. As far as I see there is no other forum software to consider besides NodeBB and discourse, or did I miss something?

I am going to set up two servers to install the software on. If someone wants to help with the setup, let me know. I would prefer to do server provisioning with Saltstack as this is what the rest of yii website is based on. I will prepare a repository for putting the salt states in.

[samdark]

Good plan. Go forward with it.

[jacmoe]

NodeBB uses MongoDB only, and has been for some time (AFAIK) - the mention of Redis must be a leftover from 'the old days' :)

See https://docs.nodebb.org/installing/os/ubuntu/

MongoDB is a document database where everything is JSON: the data and the querying.
I prefer old fashioned relational DBs as opposed to document based, but MongoDB's rather nice. One just have to think differently.

For a larger NodeBB installation, check out the Qt forum: https://forum.qt.io/

[samdark]

@dynasource took 2 weeks to try using @bizley Podium. If it will not work well or will take too much time, we're reverting to the plan above.

[bizley]

Podium is not production ready I'm afraid. Its rewriting is long overdue for which I'm really sorry, just not enough hours in a day with my current job...

[samdark]

Well, there are 3 outcomes:

1. Boudewijn makes Podium production ready.
2. Boudewijn creates something new.
3. We're back to our plan.

[jacmoe]

Dogfooding is nice, but ... :) 2018-07-10 18:02 GMT+02:00 Alexander Makarov <notifications@github.com>:

…

Well, there are 3 outcomes: 1. Boudewijn makes Podium production ready. 2. Boudewijn creates something new. 3. We're back to our plan. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#84 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAFNsFG_Ppm0WL-27Lvee2a9g18K4RwDks5uFNApgaJpZM4Gvx2V> .

[cebe]

Current status:

• NodeBB https://nodebb.yii.c.cebe.net/
  • setup, saltstack states: https://github.com/yiisoft-contrib/server-salt#nodebb
  • import yii forum data
  • email integration
  • SSO with the site
  • implement ForumAdapter
• Discourse https://discourse.yii.c.cebe.net/
  • setup, saltstack states: https://github.com/yiisoft-contrib/server-salt#discourse
  • import yii forum data
  • email integration
  • SSO with the site (https://meta.discourse.org/t/official-single-sign-on-for-discourse-sso/13045, https://github.com/cviebrock/discourse-php) done in Discourse integration #374
  • implement ForumAdapter
  • https://meta.discourse.org/t/adding-an-offline-page-when-rebuilding/45238
  • https://meta.discourse.org/t/redirect-vbulletin-urls-to-discourse-urls/47394

[cebe]

Current mood:

• 👍 NodeBB, I really like the setup of nodebb, getting it to work was quite easy and making changes works well.

• 👎 Discourse, while setting things up as a docker container is super straight forward, making any changes to the config of that things needs a rebuild of the whole container stack that takes up to 1 hour of downtime :-(

• 👍 Discourse, Overall UI Interaction in Discourse works well and we can very easily integrate it into the current website layout. Also SPAM management and reputation system look more mature than in NodeBB.

• 👍 Discourse, email integration works like a charm. It even works like a mailing list if you want it to.

• 👎 NodeBB, getting the email integration to the same level as Discourse will not be trivial.

If there would not be the deployment issue with Discourse I would make a decision for it now, but for now both are still in the race.

[rob006]

@cebe It should be possible to minimize downtime time by using separate containers for data and web app. Then you could rebuild web container while old one is still working.

[cebe]

@rob006 do you have experience with running docker in production? could you help with making discourse setup better?

Current deployment code is here: https://github.com/yiisoft-contrib/server-salt
I can give you access to the server if you want to work on it.

[rob006]

@cebe Nope, I'm not a docker fan, I'm avoiding it even in development environments. :P I just googled this some time ago to find solution for this ridiculous limitation. I did not have enough patience to actually try it.

You may try to ping https://github.com/yiisoft/yii2-docker team, they should be more experienced in this matter.

[cebe]

Nope, I'm not a docker fan, I'm avoiding it even in development environments. :P

same here :)

You may try to ping https://github.com/yiisoft/yii2-docker team, they should be more experienced in this matter.

Will try that, good idea!

[samdark]

How is it going, @cebe ? Seems we have private messages and email notifications broken at current forum :(

[samdark]

Another issue: https://www.yiiframework.com/forum/index.php/topic/76918-problem-changing-email-address-in-forum-my-settings/

[cebe]

This is finally done ✨

https://forum.yiiframework.com/t/replacing-the-forum-software-moving-to-discourse/88054