This discussion is to discuss the new forum software which are entering the market, the positive benefits of the features which they are introducing to the forum market and the potential impact on the forum market as a whole from these features.
The forum market has been mainly stagnating for a number of years as many of the forum software have largely sharply slowed down when it comes to improving their software and the lack of progress eventually led to running my own open source forum software project called AtomBB as I needed a modern forum software which is capable of meeting the needs of my forums.
As you may know, a large number of new forum software projects have been starting over the last few years in order to bring much needed innovation to the forum market however, I don't think that their approach is going to have much of an impact on the forum market as they either lack key functionality (like usergroups) or they have insanely high software requirements (like Discourse).
With my project however, we are going with an approach where we have extensive Plugin API as it would make plugins much less likely to break between releases (plugins would in theory, almost never break when they only use the API and don't touch the code directly via hooks).
Another thing which we are going with are plugin hooks which allow plugins to inject content into certain points in the templates which is intended to make it easier to upgrade, so that plugins don't have to jump through hoops in order to modify the templates properly.
The Plugin API would have a positive impact of upgrades being a lot less painful as you don't have to chase as many plugins around (can be very bad when you have a large number of plugins installed) when a new big update is released which means that you can take advantage of the new features or changes made in the updates much faster. The same thing can be said about the template hooks.
A likely and possible impact on the forum market would possibly be the other forum software taking this functionality and using it themselves (or prioritising it further, if they already have it planned out) which would mean that the forum market as a whole would be pushed towards much less painful upgrades (particularly, in the free space where these features are nearly non-existent).
The forum market has been mainly stagnating for a number of years as many of the forum software have largely sharply slowed down when it comes to improving their software and the lack of progress eventually led to running my own open source forum software project called AtomBB as I needed a modern forum software which is capable of meeting the needs of my forums.
As you may know, a large number of new forum software projects have been starting over the last few years in order to bring much needed innovation to the forum market however, I don't think that their approach is going to have much of an impact on the forum market as they either lack key functionality (like usergroups) or they have insanely high software requirements (like Discourse).
With my project however, we are going with an approach where we have extensive Plugin API as it would make plugins much less likely to break between releases (plugins would in theory, almost never break when they only use the API and don't touch the code directly via hooks).
Another thing which we are going with are plugin hooks which allow plugins to inject content into certain points in the templates which is intended to make it easier to upgrade, so that plugins don't have to jump through hoops in order to modify the templates properly.
The Plugin API would have a positive impact of upgrades being a lot less painful as you don't have to chase as many plugins around (can be very bad when you have a large number of plugins installed) when a new big update is released which means that you can take advantage of the new features or changes made in the updates much faster. The same thing can be said about the template hooks.
A likely and possible impact on the forum market would possibly be the other forum software taking this functionality and using it themselves (or prioritising it further, if they already have it planned out) which would mean that the forum market as a whole would be pushed towards much less painful upgrades (particularly, in the free space where these features are nearly non-existent).
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