Laravel Firefly

Firefly is a simple forum package for Laravel, created for ease of use and expansion.

The package ships with a frontend included, but by publishing the packages assets you have the flexibility to customize the available templates and make them match your current applications templates, should you so desire.

Installation

Install the package:

composer require andreaselia/laravel-firefly

Publish package files (config, migrations, assets and views):

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Firefly\FireflyServiceProvider"

Run the migrations:

php artisan migrate

Add the FireflyUser trait to your User model:

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Firefly\Traits\FireflyUser;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notifiable;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use HasFactory, Notifiable, FireflyUser;
}

Optional Features

Watchers

You can enable users to "watch" discussions by adding / updating the flag in the config:

'features' => [
    'watchers' => true,
    // ...
],

This will allow watchers to be notified when new posts are made in the discussion

WYSIWYG Editor

The WYSIWYG Editor uses the Quill library, and the docs can be found here.

You can enable a WYSIWYG editor by adding/updating the flag in the config like so:

'features' => [
    // ...
    'wysiwyg' => [
        'enabled' => true,
        'theme' => 'snow', // More about themes at https://quilljs.com/docs/themes/
        'toolbar_options' => [ // Docs at https://quilljs.com/docs/modules/toolbar/
            ['bold', 'italic', 'underline', 'strike'],
            [['list' => 'ordered'], ['list'=> 'bullet']],
            ['clean'],
        ],
    ],
    // ...
],

The snow theme and basic editing controls are provided out of the box in the config, but these can be modified to fit your needs.

Correct Posts

You can enable the ability to mark a post as "correct" indicating that it answers the question or is a promoted post. Correct posts are promoted to the top, directly under the initial post.

Note: If you are enabling this on an existing install, you should make sure to run database migrations and then run the posts:set-initial-flag command, to bring your database up to date. This also introduces two new policies, mark and unmark.

'features' => [
    'correct_posts' => true,
    // ...
],

Reactions

Enabling reactions allows users to react to posts with emojis. This work similarly to Discord, Slack and other popluar messaging systems. Clicking a reaction will add it to the post. Clicking the same one again will remove it.

If you are running an older version or older charset in mySQL or using another database that does not handle native emojis correctly, enabling the convert flag will convert the emojis to and from html entities so they are stored correctly on the back-end. If you are usingutf8mb4 charsets or newer, this is not needed.

Note: If you are enabling this on an existing install, you should make sure to run database migrations. This also introduces a new policy react.

'features' => [
    'reactions' => [
        'enabled' => true,
        'convert' => true
     ]
    // ...
],

Policies

By default, Firefly policies are very permissive. In order to customize the permissions for your own application, please use your AuthServiceProvider file to overwrite the policies by following the steps below.

1. Create your policy files via php artisan make:policy MyGroupPolicy
2. In the generated class, extend the base Firefly policy:

<?php

namespace App\Policies;

use Illuminate\Auth\Access\HandlesAuthorization;
use Firefly\Policies\GroupPolicy;

class MyGroupPolicy extends GroupPolicy
{
    // ...

3. Implement whatever policy you wish (use the policies in vendor/andreaselia/laravel-firefly/src/Policies for reference)
4. Update the policies array in the app/Providers/AuthServiceProvider.php file like so:

<?php

use Firefly\Models\Group;

// ...

protected $policies = [
    Group::class => 'App\Policies\MyGroupPolicy',
];

Learn more about Laravel policies here.

Contributing

You're more than welcome to submit a pull request, or if you're not feeling up to it - create an issue so someone else can pick it up.