website/forum

Forum and comments (Flarum)

The forum is a separate PHP application (Flarum 2, PHP 8.3+, MariaDB or MySQL). It is not part of the static build: the site only links to it and shows its threads in a frame.

Path	Role
extension/	Flarum extension oc/flarum-museum: the oc:import command and the look of embedded threads
docker/, docker-compose.yml	local test forum
import/	not versioned: machines.json (export from the extraction repo) and forum.json (thread map)

How comments work

• ../oc/scripts/06_forum.py writes import/machines.json: one entry per machine with its archived comments, oldest first.
• php flarum oc:import creates one discussion per machine: an opening post linking to the museum page, then one post per archived comment, all by the user Archive, with the original author and date at the top of each post and the original date as the post date. Discussions go under three tags (Computers, Consoles, Pongs) that are hidden from "All discussions".
• The command records what it imported (table oc_threads) and skips it on later runs, so it can be run again when new machines arrive. It writes the map machine → discussion to forum.json.
• Copied to ../data/forum.json, that map makes make content give every machine a Comments tab pointing at its thread (forum_thread in the page front matter); the old comments are then no longer written into the pages.
• With params.forum.url set, the Comments tab shows <forum>/embed/<id> (Flarum's Embed extension) in a frame that follows the height of the thread.

Local test

make forum-up        # http://localhost:8081, admin / adminadmin (first start takes a minute)
make forum-import    # export + import; safe to repeat

To see it in the site, copy forum/import/forum.json to data/forum.json, run make content, and build with HUGO_PARAMS_FORUM_URL=http://localhost:8081 hugo server. Do not commit a data/forum.json made from the test forum: its thread numbers are not those of the real one.

Server install (outline)

The forum must live outside the folder make deploy writes to (that folder is synchronised with deletion). On the test server: web/oldcomputers-forum/, next to web/oldcomputers/.

1. PHP 8.3 or newer with curl, dom, fileinfo, gd, json, mbstring, openssl, pdo_mysql, tokenizer, zip; an empty database and a user for it.

2. composer create-project flarum/flarum oldcomputers-forum "^2.0", then in that folder composer require flarum/embed "^2.0".

3. Web server: requests that are not files go to public/index.php, and nothing outside public/ is served. Flarum ships rules for Apache (public/.htaccess) and nginx (.nginx.conf); a sub-folder install is described in the Flarum documentation ("Customizing paths").

4. Open the forum address and finish the installer (database, administrator account).

5. Copy extension/ to packages/oc-museum/ in the forum folder, then:

   composer config repositories.oc path "packages/*"
   composer require "oc/flarum-museum:*@dev"
   php flarum migrate
   php flarum extension:enable flarum-tags
   php flarum extension:enable flarum-embed
   php flarum extension:enable oc-museum
   

6. In the admin panel: e-mail settings (registration confirms addresses by e-mail), and a spam filter extension. Schedule a database dump.

7. Import: copy import/machines.json to the server and run

   php flarum oc:import machines.json --site-url=https://example.org/oldcomputers --map=forum.json
   

   then bring forum.json back as data/forum.json, set params.forum.url, make content, make deploy.

The forum and the site should share one domain: logging in from the embedded thread relies on the forum's cookie, which browsers restrict across domains.