Flarum is

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporar ...

software written primarily in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...

, and a combination of

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

and TypeScript for its user interface. It was created as part of a merger of two existing forum software,

FluxBB PunBB (''PunBulletinBoard'') is a lightweight PHP-based internet discussion board system released under the GNU General Public License. The project's primary goal is to be a faster, smaller, and less graphic alternative to discussion boards such ...

and esoTalk, and their two main developers, Franz Liedke and Toby Zerner. Flarum is designed to be minimal forum software with high extensibility. Most common features in other forum software are extensions to Flarum's core software, such as locking threads, private messaging, flagging posts, and assigning tags (categories) to discussions.

History

Flarum's history dates back long before the merger of

and esoTalk. Flarum's philosophy was conceptualised in 2010 by Toby Zerner, with initial designs and prototypes being created as early as 2012, and he entered Flarum into the

University of Adelaide The University of Adelaide (informally Adelaide University) is a public research university located in Adelaide, South Australia. Established in 1874, it is the third-oldest university in Australia. The university's main campus is located on N ...

's eChallenge programme, winning the 2nd place prize with the project's idea. In October 2014, Toby Zerner and his friend Stephen Grace launched a

Kickstarter Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of July 2021, ...

crowdfunding campaign to help fund Flarum's development at a time when Toby was studying medicine. The funds raised were planned to allow him to take a year out of his medical training in order to develop Flarum full-time, along with launching a paid cloud hosting service alongside Flarum. However, approximately two weeks after the Kickstarter launch, the campaign was cancelled, instead favoring an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and public approach to project development. The prototype code was published to GitHub in December 2014. The original Flarum prototypes were created in PHP and JavaScript, using Laravel as a backend framework and

Ember.js Ember.js is an open-source JavaScript web framework that utilizes a component-service pattern. It allows developers to create scalable single-page web applications by incorporating common idioms, best practices, and patterns from other single-pa ...

as a frontend framework. In April 2015, Ember.js was replaced with Mithril.js, which is still used in the latest releases of Flarum. On August 27, 2015, the first beta version of Flarum was released to the public. On July 4, 2019, Toby Zerner announced he would be leaving the Flarum project to focus on his own premium forum software, leaving Franz Liedke and Daniël Klabbers to lead the project into the future. Following Toby's departure, the remaining members of the Flarum team proceeded to found the non-profit ''Flarum Foundation'' (Dutch: ''Stichting Flarum'') to be the legal owner of the Flarum open-source project, and its registered trademark. In February 2021, Franz Liedke announced that he would also be leaving the Flarum project, due to being unable to consistently dedicate time to the project, leaving Daniël Klabbers to lead Flarum. In May 2021, the first stable version of Flarum was released, after a total of 11 years in development. In June 2021, a critical security vulnerability was found in Flarum's initial stable release allowing for cross-site scripting attacks against other users through clicking a URL. This was fixed with a patch release as version 1.0.2.

Controversy

Shortly after Flarum's initial stable release, a cross-site scripting vulnerability was found in the search field which could allow users to execute arbitrary

code without a user's permission. This vulnerability was patched in version 1.0.2. Following this vulnerability, the Flarum team opted to partner with open-source security reporting websit
Huntr.dev
to allow for a more streamlined way to report issues, as well as providing a bounty for reports and fixes without costing the open-source project money.

References

External links

* * * {{URL, https://blomstra.net, Blomstra Free Internet forum software Free groupware Free software programmed in PHP Internet forum software PHP software

History

Controversy

See also

References

External links