Prepackaged Forums in Setup Wizard

I just spent the better part of an entire evening playing with Composr in a MAMP environment and have to say I AM IMPRESSED! Great job!

One thing I wanted to touch on is the forum software that can be integrated with the site during the setup wizard. Will you be offering any more forums choices to the list? If not, can they be easily integrated afterwards?

There's simply no way I'd could get those old school forums approved by my members. We would prefer to use something modern like Discourse, NodeBB, or my top choice (when out of beta), Flarum.

Thoughts?

If you can write a forum driver for whatever modern forum you want to use, yes. Otherwise you could install it separately and include it into your site and navigation.

Composr has it's own forum though, Conversr (we're using it now), which is the recommended option and the default. It ties into the profile and other areas of the system seamlessly. I don't think there are any plans to support additional alternative forums, personally not sure why other forums are supported, Conversr has all the obvious features of a forum and some exclusive ones.

Do the other forum options offered during the setup wizard not tie in with the Compose user profiles like Conversr?

Trying to read this forum on mobile (BlackBerry Passport and Google Nexus 6P) is not an enjoyable UX at all; I am constantly pinching/spreading the screen and panning left and right. Is there a live mobile responsive instance of Conversr running somewhere on the Web that I can go and look at?

I am unable post an image taken by my camera phone because Conversr only gives me the option to post images via external URL. Do you have mobile image posting disabled or is that option simply not available in Composr? 

They can be tied in, but obviously as they are external systems with totally different codebases and styling it would take some amount of effort if you wanted it to look and feel like a part of the package.  

There is a Composr shared demo (not sure which beta version) @ Serving demo content to you! - Composr demo
You can set up a personal demo @ Create a personal demo - Composr

There is a mobile view link in the footer if needed, not sure if the system autodetects all devices. Not too sure about the mobile stuff in general, sorry I can't be more helpful.

The simplified attachements UI is turned on by default and there have been bugs reported regarding it. As a Beta version bugs are to be expected. I am pretty sure you can post images via mobile and it will likely be fixed in Beta3.

Out of interest, what is it that you feel is missing from Conversr that those modern forum systems you mentioned have? Perhaps that kind of feedback would lead to Conversr evolving some more.

KingBast said

There is a mobile view link in the footer if needed, not sure if the system autodetects all devices.

I guess I was already in mobile view. Switching it to the full version made it worse, but only slightly so.

KingBast said

The simplified attachements UI is turned on by default and there have been bugs reported regarding it. As a Beta version bugs are to be expected. I am pretty sure you can post images via mobile and it will likely be fixed in Beta3.

From “Post #95”, 18th February 2016, 5:31 pm

Ok sounds good. Not being able to post images via mobile camera phones would be a deal breaker. 

KingBast said

Out of interest, what is it that you feel is missing from Conversr that those modern forum systems you mentioned have? Perhaps that kind of feedback would lead to Conversr evolving some more.

From “Post #96”, 18th February 2016, 5:42 pm

Conversr looks and feels like it came from a different time. The last sense I get from Conversr is that it was designed as a mobile-fist application. It's extremely clunky to use on my phones.

I would be willing to wager that if you used Flarum (or NodeBB and Discourse) for a single day you would scrap Conversr immediately. Keep in mind Flarum is in early beta, but I firmly believe it is already the best choice of the trio, and also the easiest (by far) to integrate with Composr CMS since it shares much of the back-end stack.

I would be highly recommend your team open a dialog with the good folks at Flarum in the interest of offering integration with Composr (there is already talk of integrating it with Wordpress user profiles).

We currently use vB5 and most of our members hate it for it's clumsy mobile experience. Unfortunately, using Composr would be a similar experience. In fact, just typing this post has been extremely frustrating because now I cannot get to the bottom of the text editor window, so I have to type this ABOVE the paragraphs below. 

I can appreciate all the options available in the Conversr back-end – there are lots of configurations not available on any other forum software. But it's all for nothing if no one wants to use the software. Just typing this post was enough to steer me away from your software.