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Okay, this bugs me just a little bit. From the story page[1]: > A piece of software that depends on extensions will surely fail without the establishment of a

Okay, this bugs me just a little bit. From the story page[1]: > A piece of software that depends on extensions will surely fail without the establishment of an ecosystem. I do not intend to make the same mistake with Flarum. This seems incorrect to me. If you look today, there are still a several people that actively develop plugins for esoTalk. The community has contributed plugins for Markdown, OAuth, signatures, and social sharing. I myself have made Mandrill and Mailchimp integrations within the last couple months. > Without the feedback of a team, I have produced some low-quality code and APIs that will surely need revision. This statement about Flarum sounds to me like the stated reason esoTalk[2] was left in favor of a complete rewrite—it needed a lot of work. Reviewing some of the history... There was an open source forum solution that had an established base of users that was completely abandoned for an attempted kickstarter of a ground-up rewrite. The kickstarter didn't work, so they're bootstrapping it and going to try to monetize with a paid marketplace and a "service-based business." It all strikes me as a promotional effort to base a kickstarter and a business around. Toby has already been successful in making a fast and simple forum software, esoTalk. Toby, if your interests are in making freely available forum software but your career path remains focused on medical school, why invest so much time into starting a business around new forum software instead of just putting some time into revamping what you already had? I'm trying to see the motivation behind this as something which would justify killing off your own forum project and leaving folks who use your software, besides making some cash on a side business, but I can't. [1]: http://flarum.org/story/ http://flarum.org/story/ [2]: https://github.com/esotalk/esoTalk https://github.com/esotalk/esoTalk

Gigablah 11y ago
I'd say creating a solid, modular codebase upon modern PHP/JS best practices is a valid enough motivation. I've been waiting for a project like this myself.
tobyzerner 11y ago
Fair points. I guess I consider esoTalk to be somewhat of a lost cause in terms of the way it's built. It's a pain to implement fixes and features, maintain, and is pretty limited in what it can do (and how it can be extended). Simply put, I didn't enjoy working on it. When I said "I have produced some low-quality code and APIs that will surely need revision", I'm mostly talking about more semantic things like class naming and organization. The majority of Flarum's architecture is very solid, testable, and will be easy to maintain. Doesn't compare to esoTalk. Admittedly, if I just wanted to start a business and make some cash, you're right: I probably could've just persisted with esoTalk. But it's not all about money – it's also about doing the best work that I can, enjoying it, and making damn good forum software with great potential. There will eventually be a migration path from esoTalk to Flarum, and I still merge PRs from time to time... so I like to think I'm not completely abandoning the esoTalk folk!

Gigablah 11y ago

I'd say creating a solid, modular codebase upon modern PHP/JS best practices is a valid enough motivation. I've been waiting for a project like this myself.

tobyzerner 11y ago

Fair points. I guess I consider esoTalk to be somewhat of a lost cause in terms of the way it's built. It's a pain to implement fixes and features, maintain, and is pretty limited in what it can do (and how it can be extended). Simply put, I didn't enjoy working on it. When I said "I have produced some low-quality code and APIs that will surely need revision", I'm mostly talking about more semantic things like class naming and organization. The majority of Flarum's architecture is very solid, testable, and will be easy to maintain. Doesn't compare to esoTalk. Admittedly, if I just wanted to start a business and make some cash, you're right: I probably could've just persisted with esoTalk. But it's not all about money – it's also about doing the best work that I can, enjoying it, and making damn good forum software with great potential. There will eventually be a migration path from esoTalk to Flarum, and I still merge PRs from time to time... so I like to think I'm not completely abandoning the esoTalk folk!