I recently announced about installing Flarum on Nginx as my community forum software under the tag name as @restoreBin Explore. However, there were some missing elements and tools that I need to fulfill by adding Flarum extensions.
In this article I’m going detail about the Flarum extensions I personally use and which are not available default. The Flarum developer community should consider these as every person need, and make these readily available out of the box.
Best Flarum Extensions
There is the hand-picked extension that I personally use on our explore forum. Let’s get started with top Flarum extensions.
The list will be updated regularly with new additions or replacements.
Flarum SEO
The SEO plugin helps to add the schemas into the topics and question to make it discoverable in search engines. The SEO will add the rich structure data snippet into the elements to make the forum topics looks like questions and answers.
The extension will also add the unique meta title and description from the topic content to make SEO friendly.
All you need is to install the extension and extension will take care of rest. Please find the Flarum SEO installation guide.
Flarum Analytics
Unfortunately, the Flarum does not support Google Analytics tracking out of the box. This extension comes handy to add in the Analytics tracking snippet without touching the code. It also supports the Piwik’s tracking along with GA.
The installation and setup for an extension are quite simple, you can follow this guide. Once the flarum analytics is installed, you can navigate to the Administration page and navigate to the Extensions tab.
Enable the Analytics checkbox and hit on 3 dots to view Settings popup window. Within the popup window, enable Google Analytics and add your UA-XXXXXX-X tracking code. That’s all.
Best Answer
This is another useful extension that helps to select and highlight the best answers in a particular topic. This will further help in minimizing the effort to look up the actual answer to post.
Once the response is marked as “Best Answer” the Flarum SEO extension will also display it as “Answers” in the search result page.
Follow this thread to know more about Best Answer flarum extension.
FoF Links
If you’re interested in adding the quick navigation bar at the top of Flarum forum, then FoF (Friends of Flarum) Links extension can handle that very smoothly.
All you need is to install FoF Links into flarum software and head over the administration tab for setup.
The extension allows you to add internal as well as external links without any worry and also provide the ability to open the links in a new tab. Just in case.
Flarum Upload
Another feature which is missing in the Flarum is the ability to upload the files. You can embed external image links but cannot upload directly in Flarum software.
The Flarum Upload extension enhances and adds the feature to upload the files into Flarum forum software directly. The extension also has the ability to host the file via CDN and disable hotlinks to avoid uncontrolled bandwidth.
Flagrow Sitemap
Unlike WordPress, even Flarum does not generate sitemap.xml without any plugin support. The Flagrow sitemap extension auto-generate the XML file based on the topics on the forum and will update after every new topic creation.
All you need is to copy the sitemap link and submit into Google Search console for indexing. The XML sitemap link after enabling the extension will be available in forums root URL.
https://www.restorebin.com/explore/sitemap.xml wherein https://www.restorebin.com/explore/ is our explore forum’s root directory.
Flagrow Ads
If you’re looking to bombard ads to your forum users, this Flagrow Ads extension will help to set up the ad placements as well as display ads within the forum thread.
The extension enables the ads in three locations:
- Header location inside the navigation bar
- Home page sidebar under category and links
- Inside the forum topic threads
You can also adjust the frequency and placement location per needing the Ads extension setting area.
BBCode
BBCode helps to type the text in rich HTML format. If there is no BBCode or similar extension, the Flarum topics and replies will be in plain format.
The BBCode extension helps in adding the button to enhance the writing and display with proper HTML format within the flarum discussion.
Statistics
This was added as a part of the improvement to display the stats about the flarum software in real time. The extension is enabled by default, however, you can disable in the Admins section.
The Statistics will display the basic information along with a graphical representation of over the period of time. The information includes the number of users, number of discussions threads, and the number of total responses on the discussion thread.
Sticky
This is another useful extension that helps in assigning the question as sticky to stay at the top of all other topics. Fortunately, the Sticky extension is available out of the box after Flarum installation.
What Flarum extensions do you use?
I’ve already listed out the Flarum extensions that I currently use to power up my forum. I know there is a lot of development going around Flarum community software and improve supporting extensions. You can find the extensions development updates under this tag.
If I’ve to set Flarum’s future or long term goal, I think improving the support to integrate with WordPress should be the best. Since 65% of the market is powered with WordPress, this will be the best market to tap on and grow the Flarum exponentially. That’s my two cents.
What Flarum extensions do you use or looking forward from the developer community to integrate? drop your ideas below.
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