> I'd find more help and documentation online PHP options are notorious for lack of API documentation for developers and inventing their own in-house framework

> I'd find more help and documentation online PHP options are notorious for lack of API documentation for developers and inventing their own in-house frameworks despite solid ecosystem of ready solutions and libraries, or in case of solutions actually using those, burying them behind layers of their own boilerplate to make sure none of it is available to third-party developers (phpBB3 and XenForo, I am looking at you). > development would continue for the foreseeable future Like how XenForo's development froze for year and a half with zero word from its developers because of ongoing litigation, or SMF's foundation losing majority of contributors every few releases due to internal arguments with self-proclaimed project lead? Or Invision Power Board thats so busy churning out new features I remember having bugs in 3.1 that they didn't fix for 8 years and were actually moved over to next major? > The forum market is so crowded at this point that you need a bit of a gimmick or hook here As forum software dev I can tell you that there's massive sunction from developers for software that meets following criteria: - powered by known frameworks and libraries - exposing as much API as possible from those frameworks and libraries - architectured to be maintainable despite heavy customizations (this means that if I use forum software based on eg. Symfony, I still should be able to use it as framework to build complete site around) - embrancing technologies and services from outside AMP stack (like search engines, build steps for frontend's assets)