
Show HN: Natika – Simple PHP Forum for Developers - asika32764
https://github.com/asika32764/natika
======
knight17
Looking at the compose window, I feel there is scope to simplify it by
removing some infrequently applied elements. Who creates h1, h2 h3, h4 and h5
headings in forum posts. In the order of frequent use, it is link, quote,
bold, italics, picture, and attachment buttons that are frequently used. Other
buttons could be hidden or even removed without creating friction.

It looks really pleasing. I especially like that it doesn't give too much
space to display avatar and user information such as join date, user category,
posts and so on like many traditional forums that always used more vertical
space than many one or two sentence replies, eating up vertical space.

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jnardiello
Great naming, reads like "Half-ass" in italian. Other than that, great stuff

~~~
Heliosmaster
Butt cheek :)

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anton_gogolev
Mediumization of the design. Why would I want to ever see a 300px "hero unit"
in a _forum_ , of all places?

It's excellent that there's no visual noise of taglines, statuses,
achievements and other crap like that, though.

~~~
buro9
> Mediumization of the design. Why would I want to ever see a 300px "hero
> unit" in a forum , of all places?

Above each of the forum topic spaces, you would not.

But on the home page? Absolutely.

A lot of forums, especially the small and medium ones, do not have any other
software running than the forum. There is no blog, no shop, no nothing... just
the forum software for the community to use.

For them to be able to present a home page that communicates clearly and
quickly to visitors what the site is about is a boon.

It's one of the things I regret not putting into Microcosm from the outset.

For example here is a cycle club using the forum we wrote:
[http://forum.islington.cc/](http://forum.islington.cc/) and because we only
gave them the forum bit, they went and created a static page elsewhere to act
as the home page: [http://www.islington.cc/](http://www.islington.cc/)

If we had done a better job at allowing branding and communication on the home
page, that would've avoided them needing to create a second thing... and
reduced friction with more function would have helped us both.

This feels to me like one of those "what I (the techie) think they want" vs
"what they (the community owner and customer) think they want"... the hero
unit is actually a good place in between the two.

Oh, and it's worth me mentioning that Microcosm failed (
[https://microco.sm/](https://microco.sm/) ), that story is here:
[https://medium.com/tech-london/the-journey-of-a-london-
start...](https://medium.com/tech-london/the-journey-of-a-london-startup-what-
i-learned-when-my-company-failed-c67acd74b862) yet the software still exists
on Github, and the number of sites and users on my personal instance continues
growing (over 300 sites, over 70k users) with the largest single site being
[https://www.lfgss.com/](https://www.lfgss.com/) .

What Natika will learn is that it's hard to build new communities on a new
platform, and that it's hard to migrate existing ones. I with them luck.

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CM30
The design seems decent enough (especially in the admin dashboard and post
editor), but I'm not quite sure what the appeal of this software is.

I mean, it's a forum script. It seems like it does a decent enough job as a
forum script. But the amount of competition is this market is enormous, and
you're sort of competing with names that have hundreds of thousands of sites
using them along with large developer communities and lots of styling options.

If I was a developer wanting a forum on its own, then I'd probably check out
XenForo or IPB or Woltlab (paid) or MyBB or SMF or phpBB (free) before this,
because I know I'd find more help and documentation online and be assured that
development would continue for the foreseeable future.

If I wanted to integrate it with another script, I'd use a forum plugin for
the script, like BBPress, or Kunena.

If I wanted a modern, 'hip', looking forum, it'd be something like NodeBB or
(maybe) Discourse.

The forum market is so crowded at this point that you need a bit of a gimmick
or hook here. Simple and aimed at developers seems like it could work, but I
don't see much that suggests either in the screenshots or demo. Does it have a
well designed and documented API for extending the script and what not? Does
it let you remove or add features you don't/do want without writing code? Is
it easy to integrate into an existing site?

That's the sort of thing you need to have if you want it to be a forum script
for developers, and unfortunately, I don't see much evidence of that.

~~~
Ralfp
> I'd find more help and documentation online

PHP options are notorious for lack of API documentation for developers and
inventing their own in-house frameworks despite solid ecosystem of ready
solutions and libraries, or in case of solutions actually using those, burying
them behind layers of their own boilerplate to make sure none of it is
available to third-party developers (phpBB3 and XenForo, I am looking at you).

> development would continue for the foreseeable future

Like how XenForo's development froze for year and a half with zero word from
its developers because of ongoing litigation, or SMF's foundation losing
majority of contributors every few releases due to internal arguments with
self-proclaimed project lead? Or Invision Power Board thats so busy churning
out new features I remember having bugs in 3.1 that they didn't fix for 8
years and were actually moved over to next major?

> The forum market is so crowded at this point that you need a bit of a
> gimmick or hook here

As forum software dev I can tell you that there's massive sunction from
developers for software that meets following criteria:

\- powered by known frameworks and libraries \- exposing as much API as
possible from those frameworks and libraries \- architectured to be
maintainable despite heavy customizations (this means that if I use forum
software based on eg. Symfony, I still should be able to use it as framework
to build complete site around) \- embrancing technologies and services from
outside AMP stack (like search engines, build steps for frontend's assets)

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nkuttler
What about it is specifically "for developers"?

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kmfrk
I just think it’s in terms of the barrier to entry/deployment.

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kmfrk
This looks lovely. Very well done. Best-looking forum design I’ve seen.

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fiatjaf
Why are all open-source forums written in PHP?

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csn
I would guess one of the reasons to be the fact that there are a myriad of
(money-free) hosting providers out there offering plain drag&drop file
uploading with PHP support (often paired with a mysql database access). This
makes PHP software extremely easy to install.

Not that it would be even possible to run non-PHP server side scripts with
majority of said providers...

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Indeed. I follow the Wekan Kanban board project which is Meteor-based, and it
seems like it's every couple weeks someone asks "how do I install this with
cPanel" (which generally means, shared hosting with PHP/MySQL). It's kinda sad
to explain to them that their existing hosting probably isn't going to let
them run Meteor.

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fiatjaf
The design seems very much like NodeBB.

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dijit
Interesting, similar configuration format to discourse, and /somewhat/ similar
UI.

FWIW I chose discourse as my last forum software because it's written in
technologies I prefer, ruby/postgres.

Even though I prefer the UI elements of xenforo or Invision PowerBoard- I
can't ever go back to using mysql after administering oracle, mssql and
postgres.

MySQL is the mongodb of relational database design.

And PHP is the equivalent in scripting languages, unfortunately.

 __Edit; __

I wasn 't clear apparently, I was saying while I like the configuration
system, I do not like the UI, or the UI trend and I additionally do not like
to tie in with mysql, we should be deprecating mysql from personal things so
that in 10 years business can follow.

~~~
ahmedk92
>I can't ever go back to using mysql after administering oracle, mssql and
postgres

>MySQL is the mongodb of relational database design

Care stating why?

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dijit
Sure, but adding too many sources will make me seem snide or bitter.

But as an example:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgJtr9tIME](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgJtr9tIME)
MySQL vs PostgreSQL - Why you shouldn't use MySQL

[https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/glossary.html#glos_a...](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/glossary.html#glos_autocommit)

[http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-
else](http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else)

[https://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/12/28/terrible-choices-
mysql/](https://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/12/28/terrible-choices-mysql/)

the fact that [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-real-escape-
st...](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-real-escape-string.html)
has to exist because [https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-escape-
string....](https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/mysql-escape-string.html)
doesn't work properly. (this is actually blamed on PHP a lot)

My favorite MySQL gotcha is that if you issue a GRANT statement with a typo in
the user's name instead giving a "user does not exist" error it simply creates
a new user with the misspelled name.

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wanda
If you're going to use Bootstrap, at least do it right and configure the
viewport:

    
    
        <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">

~~~
Ralfp
Wording feedback like "at least do it right" makes your message unnecessarily
hostile.

