A few words about Flarum

A few words about Flarum

Flarum is a new interesting forum engine written in PHP. Well… is not really new, first beta release was almost 4 years ago, so it is with us for some time, but so far there was no stable release and project is still in beta stage. Although it already works pretty well and there are some big production deployments, there is still no backward compatibility promise and officially you should not use Flarum on production. Of course some people (like me) will ignore this warning and use this engine on production forums. I’ve used this engine for GG.deals forum and for some small local community forum. These are quite different cases, and I’d like to share my experience of using Flarum for these two forums.

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GG.deals after 6 months from launch

GG.deals after 6 months from launch

It feels like it was just yesterday, but GG.deals has launched 6 months ago. That is quite a lot of time, and GG.deals make huge progress in the meantime. We have new stores in tracker, new filters in almost all views, new view with vouchers, improved alerts management, many performance and UX improvements and many more. And bugfixes. A lot of bugfixes. 🙂 And just few days ago  there was a huge change in layout – now website should look more clear and the most important elements should be more visible and readable. More detailed list o changes can be found on forum:

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How more efficient is CPU-Optimized Droplet than Standard Droplet on DigitalOcean?

GG.deals is hosted on DigitalOcean. Although choosing DigitalOcean for hosting was pretty straightforward for us, we were still not so sure if it is worth pay extra for CPU-Optimized droplets. CPU-Optimized droplets obviously should be more efficient in CPU-intensive task, but there was no real comparison of how more efficient they are. But we get some comparison when we tried to perform database migration from Salenauts to GG.deals on two types of droplets.

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