I know that it is a bit late and I can't classified myself into a newbee but still I would like to tell my story. Let me introduce you to the labforum, the latest, lightest forum engine ever written on PHP. This was my first ever open-sourced PHP project that started my career of programming.
It's first used as a community forum in https://labstry.com, now includes an installer, and opens to the public for installing on their servers. 😝
My repo
labstry-opensource
/
labforum
A lightweight, open source PHP based forum engin. This is a mirror. Checkout https://gitlab.com/labstry/labstry_forum
Labforum 3.0 Documentation
Labforum is the core part that Labstry Forum is based on. It is a forum program that is written in php for personal interactive webpages.
Learn more about Labstry Forum here
No excess framework used
We used a simplicity first approach when building the forum. No excess framework is used so that the page loading speed is guaranteed.
Customisable with css, scss
Theme the forum or style easily with css or scss.
Installing Labforum
Before installing, please prepare the following:
- MySQL database username and password. (Please provide your administrator or root username and password for first time initialisation)
- Database domain
- Database name (Provide desired name for your forum instance)
Load page http://127.0.0.1.xip.io/install-labforum.php to start installing.
Administrator Panel
Load http://127.0.0.1.xip.io/admin/index.php to enter the administrator panel. You need special previleges to enter the admin panel. Use the account you registered yourself with from the installer
Why I started/revamped my project?
I have used many existing forum engine and I saw lots of forums is not quite user-friendly. You can't customise your layout because the data given are fixed and tied to the system core such as the layout and the pages, which means that you are unable to design your layout.
Besides, many existing forums in the market didn't have a WYSIWYG interface for thread composing.
I was in the uni and I saw a tutorial online showing people how to create a forum from scratch. Then I followed that tutorial for interest, as an extra-curriculum activity that helps me to learn things that the lecturer didn't teach. Then I came up with an idea, that is: instead of using an existing software to roll out my own community, I thought of using the existing code that I used in my tutorial lesson, change that a little bit, and make the code more useful.
Then I did what I thought, in which I found myself into the programming world. As time passes, I am getting more and more active into the development of the labforum.
Features
Frontend backend separation
The software uses json to send all the thread data. The advantages is that users have no restrictions on their design of the layout. Whether you want to deploy a simple page as the layout or a dynamic one, all up to you.
WYSIWYG Editor (Quill.js) included as default ✎
You can use the pre-included WYSIWYG editor available. You can also roll your own post editor page with your own editor.
Loads faster
Thanks to the technology of ajax, all pages are loaded asynchronously with data.
What will be coming in the next revamp
- We will include pagination by introducing
LIMITEDqueries inside mysql. - We will migrate to Medoo query framework so that it is compatible with other databases like mssql or oracle db.
What we currently need
We need new members to participate in the project. Please help us to spread the words. ☺️
Thanks for your time. Hope that you can support my project. 🤕
Time to get back to my work now
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