[chipotle_coyote]

Deploying a Rails apps is, in general, harder than deploying a PHP app.

I'm not convinced that Discourse is the right example here, though. Arguably the actual steps for installing Discourse aren't significantly more complicated than WordPress's install, because they've gone out of their way to make it as easy as possible. (It does suffer from "you must use Docker for this," which would likely intimidate non-techies who could otherwise suffer through a WP install, though.) Also, I don't think Discourse can remotely be described as an abject failure, given that virtually every forum I've seen go up in the last five or six years runs on it, and I can think of more than a few sites that migrated to it from legacy PHP forums in that time.

[Schlaefer]

> Also, I don't think Discourse can remotely be described as an abject failure, given that virtually every forum I've seen go up in the last five or six years runs on it

Two thoughts and personal observations on that:

1. Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM. In my impression it's usually deployed as default for and esp. by very tech affine communities. It was the new, hot - and is now save - thing in town.

2. You see postings boasting how the Discourse forum is now powered by a new six core 8 GB RAM server improving performance ... for 200 concurrent active users and 80k posts. Yes, Discourse offers a lot of flashy features, but that's just borderline disgusting.

[joelbluminator]

> how the Discourse forum is now powered by a new six core 8 GB RAM server improving performance ... for 200 concurrent active users and 80k posts.

I guess companies that use Discourse and have huge traffic can pay a bit more, nothing wrong with that.

[Schlaefer]

> I guess companies that use Discourse and have huge traffic can pay a bit more, nothing wrong with that.

The point being that said numbers aren't big traffic, they should be handled by a Raspi.

But for the sake of argument: Discourse is a painless move upwards for big budget and/or big knowledge entities. Nothing wrong with that.

On the other hand Discourse isn't a replacement for low cost, decentralized, easy to deploy, engine-diverse, low knowledge communities which were served by a multitude of PHP solutions in the past.

There's an economic argument for a growing divide between "communities as a service" ala Facebook and high hurdle deployments ala Discourse, but one doesn't have to be happy about this development.

[joelbluminator]

So not sure I'm following, the php solution can handle huge traffic at a low cost with a conmparable feature set? How do they achieve that then? Taking a look at phpBB it looks like they are not using a framework (e.g https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb/blob/master/phpBB/posting.php). This is good for performance but pretty shitty for an OSS proeject, anyone looking to contribute here needs to start from scratch. Discourse happens to have 4x as many contributors. Also I can't imagine the feature set of the 2 projects is even remotely similar.

[timw4mail]

To be more fair, the PHP forums tend to be much older codebases, before standout frameworks and index.php front controllers.

Much like Wordpress and phpMyAdmin, these projects are basically victims of their own success.

[zozbot234]

> This is good for performance but pretty shitty for an OSS proeject

I don't see how. The repository seems to be quite active and has plenty of current pull requests.

[joelbluminator]

The fact that there's no framework, you basically start learning the new codebase from scratch. With Rails I have a good chance of fixing a bug just by knowing the structure.

[chipotle_coyote]

Well, an entirely non-profit -- at this point, in fact, unincorporated, with no assets to speak of at all -- writing group that I'm part of migrated their forum in 2019 from a PHP forum package (I think SMF, although I wouldn't swear to that) to Discourse, and it runs just fine on what I'm fairly sure is a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet.

I don't doubt that Discourse requires more resources than most PHP forum packages do, but it doesn't need that much more.

[joelbluminator]

What's harder about deploying a Rails app? Generally interested. How does it go in Laravel land then? Rails have quite a few dependencis (Node, webpack), how is Laravel handling front end?

[chipotle_coyote]

I'll preface this by saying I'm probably getting a little ahead of my skis. :) But, I think the issue is less how modern PHP is handling all those modern dependencies and more how "old" PHP didn't make you, the person installing the application, have to know anything about them. Those old-style apps, which include WordPress and many forum software packages, get "deployed" by

1. Downloading the application archive and uncompressing it

2. Creating a MySQL database according to the documentation

3. Either editing a small config file to give the application the database credentials, or even just going to the application's index page and filling in the details on a first run experience

And... that's it. Rails has no comparable experience, unless -- like Discourse -- you put in a lot of work to get it there.

Laravel -- and Symfony -- work basically like other "modern" frameworks do, for both good and bad. Laravel has "Mix," built on webpack, for instance. So if you're looking for that in PHP, it's there, but that's kind of a tradeoff in the context of small sites deployed/managed by a single person -- a use case that I think modern webdevs sometimes lose sight of. If we go back to the example of forums, those are very often that "one person wants to host a forum for their community" kinds of things. (And I'd like to see more of us get back to self-hosted blogs -- which is part of what led me down the road of "can you write something in a not-PHP language that's still easy for someone who doesn't know anything about web development to deploy and run." The answer still seems to be "reply hazy; ask again later.")