Chronific - Building the next generation of forum software

Discussion in 'Community Forum Software' started by Chronific, Mar 11, 2014.

  1. Chronific

    Chronific Regular Member

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    Chronific

    Hey guys! My name is Falko and I'm a user interface designer and PHP developer. I've been working on my own forum software because of the lack of innovation in the current generation of forums, and the extremely slow pacing of development.

    My hope is to build a forum that is way easier to manage, fully responsive, REST APIs, module based and less visual clutter to make it less intimidating for new users.

    It's built in PHP using the open source CodeIgniter PHP framework, and is fully extendable. Every aspect of the forum is well thought out with the focus on a great browsing experience without too much distractions of complex menus, deep nested forums and settings.

    It's not yet finished, though I will release a public beta somewhere next month. Let me know what you think of this project. I will also need beta testers, so raise your hands!

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  2. pixelek

    pixelek Regular Member

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    Extremely nice, simple, easy-to-navigate script. May I become beta-tester?
     
  3. s.molinari

    s.molinari Regular Member

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    Hi Chronific,

    Welcome to the overfilled market of forum software.:)

    Some questions.

    1. Will this be open source or a paid software?
    2. You say easier to manage. What do you see as hard to manage in current software?
    3. You say lack of innovation in the market (which I agree with), but what will be innovative or different and game changing about your software?
    4. You say slow pace of software development, yet it seems you are one person(?) and other vendors have teams of developers. How do you expect to be faster paced?

    Sorry to put you through the ringer, but when I read your post, I actually got concerned you might be running really fast into a ton of disappointment, because you are basically saying your software is going to be better in many ways than what is already available, which I have a feeling isn't quite going to happen (at least not at first sight), unless you can answer the questions above with bravura.:)

    Scott
     
  4. s.molinari

    s.molinari Regular Member

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    Ok, I see you are getting more "feedback" at TAZ.

    As you can see, the forum admin community is a really tough nut to crack....and TBH, drag and drop forum reordering/management and bootstrappy/jQuery UI isn't going to impress as an innovation. I'd say, in this day and age, it is a minimum requirement.

    Scott
     
  5. Chronific

    Chronific Regular Member

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    Sure! I'll upload a beta version once it's ready. It'll be somewhere around mid-April.

    I'm also on Twitter, where I'll be posting some more inside information. https://twitter.com/chronific

    1. Open Source

    2. A couple of years ago I was the lead administrator of Consolespot and BlazeByte, which had a really active community. I noticed how our team of moderators had a hard time figuring out what the thousands of permissions stood for, because they were spread across the entire admin panel.

    The permission system in SMF e.g. isn't really always clear, and doesn't give you visual cues hints at what exactly you're doing, unless you constantly go back and forth and see what it does. I want to make the permission system clear and straight forward.

    Also, moving / arranging boards is quite a time consuming task in SMF, since you have to manually change each board/category position. As an administrator I had to do most of the work doing simple tasks as managing users and forums, simply because the team of moderators often got confused. Don't get me wrong, they were an excellent team, and managed the community really well, but I believe that simple moderative tasks deserve the same user friendly experience as any other end-user feature of the forum does.

    I'm not bashing SMF here, it's a great piece of software. I'm just giving you an example of where I ran into troubles in my experiences as an administrator.

    That's something I knew from the beginning. I was once a PSP homebrew developer. Pleasing the PSP fanboy community was way harder.
    My goal is to reach something with this project, and to please as many people as possible who have the same ideology as me regarding the complexity of current forum software. It's those kind of people that make it all worth it. ;)

    It is absolutely a minimum requirement, yet it baffles me how barely any of the existing (open-source) forum software have implemented it. This feature by itself makes it a ton easier for moderators. You have to keep in mind that not all moderators/administrators are on the same level as the people on Admin-Talk are. Some people just want to start a forum without worrying to much about setting it up properly. The less time they have to spend on the admin panel, the more they can focus on their community. :)

    Note that I'm talking about smaller forums with 1 or 2 administrators who do everything by themselves.
     
  6. s.molinari

    s.molinari Regular Member

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    Ok, so you'll be shooting to make a better OSS forum system. There is room for improvement in that market, but there are also others bringing "new" stuff to that market too in the likes of NodeBB, Misago and Discourse (off the top of my head). You are in good company.

    What made you decide to use code igniter and not any other framework?

    Scott
     
  7. Allan

    Allan It's All Good

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    So far it's looking nice, how is the theme making system. Oh and raising my hands for beta ;)
     
  8. signal500

    signal500 Regular Member

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    Hopefully you plan to "innovate" a new UI, because that looks like phpBB and a lot of wasted time reinventing wheels.
     

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