Welcome to the Laravel.io forums public beta

The fact that we've gotten this far is a testement to the efforts of a number of members in our community. I want to extend a huge thanks to everyone who has participated so far. There are a few things that I'd like to cover to give some context to this public beta run.

The Purpose of this Beta

We need people to use this forum so that we can learn more about how the tagging system, etc works in practice. We need to find bugs, and find glaring omissions. We'll be adding functionality and making fixes consistently.

1. The application is not complete.

This application has been built as a volunteer effort by community members. There are many things to be improved upon. However, it's important to get some experience with real-world usage before we go too much further.

Many things are missing.. for example.. the forum thread list could better indicate how threads are tagged. We also expect to improve the way in which source code is shared by making it even easier to create gists and include them in posts.

Search is currently missing and is a high priority for a full launch. We'll start by implementing something simple. Then, we'll focus on a better long-term solution.

Markdown is used to add links etc to forum posts. We're going to include a basic markdown reference, but we haven't done that yet.

2. Github Authentication

The application uses Github authentication and nothing more. This is controversial to some. However, it solves an incredible amount of problems with the current community setup and we feel that it will result in improved interactions on the forums, remove bot spam, allow people to get to know one another better and prevent the need for our members to have even more accounts around the web to deal with.

There are no plans to enable other forms of authentication and at this point.. this is one of the few features that we are standing firm about. Please allow the application to run for a while before being too critical about this feature.

3. Community Articles

Currently, you only see the beginnings of a forum here. We have almost completed functionality that allows any users to post their own articles. This could be used to give community members their own blog or to simply contribute articles that they feel could improve the Laravel knowledgebase.

This functionality was rooted in the "Laravel Foundations Project" and like EVERY aspect of this system, it's intended to give power to community members to publish content without the need for moderation or guiding authorities.

4. Universal Tagging

The entire Laravel.io app uses a universal tagging system. Currently, this is just forums and articles (articles will be released public beta very soon). With each new forum thread that is created, or with each new article that is written, the author can add up to 3 tags which define the content within. The goal of this is to further categorize the content created by users so that we can better make use of it.

Currently, the forums are noisy and there are essentially just a few open boards that exist for getting help. If you go into one of these boards with the goal of getting help, you could scan through the posts and find nothing relevant for you. Instead, we break down the sections by category. In this way, you're more likely to click into a category that is relevant to your situation and find information that can help you. This may make the forums a more valuable resource and reduce the amount of redundant posts.

5. Styling needs a lot of work

We're aware of this and we already have designers volunteering their effort to make this project a success. Please forgive our mess while we continue to improve the app.

6. Source Embedding

Yes, you can create a gist (even a multi-file gist) and paste the url into a forum post and it'll automatically embed. However, this is probably not going to be our primary go-to for source embedding in the medium-term. Someone could delete their gist down the road and then the forum post may no longer have the context it needs. We're working on a custom solution to this that should be pretty nice.

What we need from you!

We need to see how people use this site. Please consider posting as normal and trying to find bugs or situations in which things just aren't working. There haven't been any field tests of this application. So, we're expecting to find a lot.

One of the things that we need the most feedback about is the tagging system. We came up with a number of tags based on the Laravel documentation and issues that we've seen on the current forum. In practice, some of these may not be useful and we may be missing some. Feel free to give us feedback on this. There is a separate forum post that you can reply to if you have suggestions.