The initial code-base was forked from one of my side projects, but has now gone far beyond that. We've moved along in a development and the software should be stable for general use, although we're always making improvements.
File an issue or open a topic on the forum, if there's something you want and you very well might find it landing in the software fairly quickly.
Features may break from time to time, however I will generally try to warn of the biggest offenders in advance, so that you can tread with caution around certain commits, the upcoming v0.1 will undergo even more rigorous testing.
Even when features break however, the updater should be able to handle everything which is thrown your way, so that you can sail through with ease.
For plugin and theme developers, things are a little dicier, as the internal APIs and ways of writing themes are in constant flux, however some stability in that area should be coming fairly soon.
If you dislike it, please give us some feedback on how to make it better! We're always looking for feedback. We love hearing your opinions. If there's something missing or something doesn't look quite right, don't worry! We plan to add many, many things in the coming months!
Standard Forum Functionality. All of the little things you would expect of any forum software. E.g. Common Moderation features, modlogs, theme system, avatars, bbcode parser, markdown parser, report system, per-forum permissions, group permissions and so on.
A template engine which compiles templates down to machine code. Over forty times faster than the standard template library `html/templates`, although it does remove some of the hand holding to achieve this. Compatible with templates written for html/templates, so you don't need to learn any new templating language.
Go 1.10 - You will need to install this. Pick the .msi, if you want everything sorted out for you rather than having to go around updating the environment settings. https://golang.org/doc/install
MySQL Database - You will need to setup a MySQL Database somewhere. A MariaDB Database works equally well and is much faster than MySQL. You could use something like WNMP / XAMPP which have a little PHP script called PhpMyAdmin for managing MySQL databases or you could install MariaDB directly.
Download the .msi installer from [MariaDB](https://mariadb.com/downloads) and run that. You may want to set it up as a service to avoid running it every-time the computer starts up.
We recommend changing the root password (that is the password for the user 'root'). Remember that password, you will need it for the installation process. Of course, we would advise using a user other than root for maximum security, although that adds additional steps to the process of getting everything setup.
It's entirely possible that your host might already have MySQL, so you might be able to skip this step, particularly if it's a managed VPS or a shared host (contrary to popular belief, it is possible, although the ecosystem in this regard is extremely immature). Or they might have a quicker and easier method of setting up MySQL.
At some point, we'll have releases which you can download, but right now, you'll have to use the `git clone` command as mentioned down in the advanced setup section to download a copy of Gosora.
On Windows, you might also want to try the [GosoraBootstrapper](https://github.com/Azareal/GosoraBootstrapper), if you can't find the command prompt. It's just a matter of double-clicking on the bat file there and it'll download the rest of the files for you.
Run install.bat, e.g. double-click on it. You will also have to start-up MySQL, which if you're using Wnmp or friends is just a matter of opening that program and starting the MySQL process via it.
You can update the dependencies which Gosora relies on by running update-deps.bat on Windows or ./update-deps-linux on Linux. These dependencies do not include Go or MySQL, those have to be updated separately.
We're also looking into ways to distribute ready made executables for Windows. While this is not a complicated endeavour, the configuration settings currently get built with the rest of the program for speed, and we will likely have to change this.
With the introduction of the new settings system, we will begin moving some of the less critical settings out of the configuration file, and will likely have a config.xml or config.ini in the future to store the critical settings in.
Several important features for saving memory in the templates system may have to be implemented before the new compiled template system is rolled out to every route. These features are coming fairly soon, but not before the higher priority items.
This section explains how to set things up without running the batch or shell files. For Windows, you will likely have to open up cmd.exe (the app called Command Prompt in Win10) to run these commands inside or something similar, while with Linux you would likely use the Terminal or console.
Linux is similar, however you might need to use cd and mv a bit more like in the shell files due to the differences in go build across platforms. Additionally, Linux doesn't require `StackExchange/wmi` or `/x/sys/windows`
You also need to substitute the `gosora.exe` bits for `./Gosora` on Linux. For more info, you might want to take a gander inside the `./run-linux` and `./install-linux` shell files to see how they're implemented.
I'm looking into minimising the number of go gets for the advanced build and to maybe remove the platform and database engine specific dependencies if possible for those who don't need them.
The update system is currently under development, however if you have Git installed, then you can run `dev-update.bat` or `dev-update-linux` to update your instance to the latest commit and to update the associated database schema, etc.
In addition to this, you can update the dependencies without updating Gosora by running `update-deps.bat` or `./update-deps-linux` (.bat is for Windows, the other for Linux as the names would suggest).
If you want to manually patch Gosora rather than relying on the above scripts to do it, you'll first have to create a copy of `./schema/schema.json` named `./schema/lastSchema.json`, and then, you'll overwrite the files with the new ones.
After that, you'll need to run `go build ./patcher` on Windows or the following code block on Linux:
```
cd ./patcher
go build -o Patcher
mv ./Patcher ..
```
Once you've done that, you just need to run `patcher.exe` (Windows) or `./Patcher` to apply the latest patches to the database, etc.
For the default plugins like Markdown and Helloworld, you can find them in the Plugin Manager of your Control Panel. For ones which aren't included by default, you will need to drag them from your /extend/ directory and into the / directory (the root directory of your Gosora installation, where the executable and most of the main Go files are).
You will then need to recompile Gosora in order to link the plugin code with Gosora's code. For plugins not written in Gosora (e.g. JavaScript), you do not need to move them from the /extend/ directory, they will automatically show up in your Control Panel ready to be installed.
Experimental plugins aka the ones in the /experimental/ folder (e.g. plugin_sendmail) are similar but different. You will have to move native plugins (ones written in Go) to the root directory of your installation and will have to move experimental plugins written in other languages into the /extend/ directory.
We're looking for ways to clean-up the plugin system so that all of them (except the experimental ones) are housed in /extend/, however we've encountered some problems with Go's packaging system. We plan to fix this issue in the future.
# Dependencies (a few of these like Rez aren't currently in use, but we anticipate that we'll need some sort of search engine library in the very immediate future)
* github.com/Azareal/gopsutil For pulling information on CPU and memory usage. I've temporarily forked this, as we were having stability issues with the latest build.
* golang.org/x/sys/windows Also a dependency for gopsutil on Windows. This isn't needed at the moment, as I've rolled things back to an older more stable build.
There are several plugins which are bundled with the software by default. These cover various common tasks which aren't common enough to clutter the core with or which have competing implementation methods (E.g. plugin_markdown vs plugin_bbcode for post mark-up).
* Social Groups - An extremely unstable WIP plugin which lets users create their own little discussion areas which they can administrate / moderate on their own.
There are a few things you'll need to know before running the more developer oriented features like the tests or the benchmarks.
The benchmarks are currently being rewritten as they're currently extremely serial which can lead to severe slow-downs when run on a home computer due to the benchmarks being run on the one core everything else is being run on (Browser, OS, etc.) and the tests not taking parallelism into account.
