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 somewhat stable for general use.
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.
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 run up to v0.1!
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.
A plugin system. We have a number of APIs and hooks for plugins, however they're currently subject to change and don't cover as much of the software as we'd like yet.
Go 1.10 or newer - 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
You will also want to run `ln -s /usr/local/go/bin/go` (replace /usr/local with where ever you put Go), so that go becomes visible to other users.
If you followed the instructions above, you can update to the latest version of Go simply by deleting the `/go/` folder and replacing it with a `/go/` folder for the latest version of Go.
Git - You may need this for downloading updates via the updater. You might already have this installed on your server, if the `git` commands don't work, then install this. https://git-scm.com/downloads
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.
If you're using Ubuntu, you might want to look at: https://www.itzgeek.com/how-tos/linux/ubuntu-how-tos/install-mariadb-on-ubuntu-16-04.html
It's entirely possible that your host already has MySQL installed and ready to go, so you might be able to skip this step, particularly if it's a managed VPS or a shared host. Or they might have a quicker and easier method of setting up MySQL.
On Windows, you might want to try the [GosoraBootstrapper](https://github.com/Azareal/GosoraBootstrapper), if you can't find the command prompt or otherwise can't follow those instructions. It's just a matter of double-clicking on the bat file there and it'll download the rest of the files for you.
If you haven't setup a service, you can run `./run-linux`, although you will be responsible for finding a way to run it in the background, so that it doesn't close when the terminal does.
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 hope to fix this issue in the future.
A few of these like Rez aren't currently in use, but are things we think we'll need in the very near future and want to have those things ready, so that we can quickly slot them in.
* 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.
* github.com/esimov/caire The other image resizer, slower but may be useful for covering cases Rez does not. A third faster one we might point to at some point is probably Discord's Lilliput, however it requires a C Compiler and we don't want to add that as a dependency at this time.
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.
