I will try not to forget any new features we've now released on ForumSpark. As we are nearing 2.0, we've done some more preparations to make the development easier and break less stuff - we hope.
This is a big one. There's a major new feature in Clubs, a member subscriptions system, a realtime layer powered by Ably, plus a stack of smaller additions, theme work, mobile improvements, and the usual round of bug fixes.
Clubs (New - Earn)
Clubs are a new way to organise a community within your board. Members can create a club, invite people in, and get their own discussion space - all without an admin having to spin up forums by hand.
A public Clubs index lists every club on the board, with category navigation and filters. Each club has a detail page, a members list, and a manage console where the owner can edit forums inline.
Clubs support a few different visibility modes - public, open, closed, and private - along with paid clubs that require a specific group. Owners can choose whether only they can invite new members, or whether existing members can bring others in too. Categories let admins keep larger directories tidy.
Behind the scenes, each club gets its own backing group automatically, and members are synced to a secondary group so existing permission systems keep working without special-casing clubs.
On the admin side, there's a new Clubs moderation panel, full CRUD for club categories, and extension settings to control the feature board-wide.
Two new widgets ship alongside the feature: a "Clubs list" widget for surfacing the directory, and a "My clubs - recent content" widget for showing members the latest activity in clubs they belong to.
Club invitations also generate a notification so invitees actually find out they've been invited, rather than having to stumble across it.
Finally, there's a new can_create_clubs group permission so you can decide which groups are allowed to start their own clubs.
Member Subscriptions (New - Launch/Earn)
Member subscriptions are now a first-class feature. You can define plans, issue coupons, accept payments, and the system handles the full lifecycle - including the earn-phase and paid-phase states - with optional plan images.
Both Stripe and PayPal are supported, with webhooks wired up for each so renewals, cancellations, and failures all flow back into the board automatically.
Launch receives basic subscriptions (PayPal), while Earn receives the full suite (Stripe, coupons, multiple plans, etc).
Members get subscribe pages to browse and join plans, and admins get full CRUD for managing them. Subscription lifecycle events also fire notifications so members aren't left guessing about the state of their plan.
Realtime Activity (New, Ably)
The board now has a live activity layer running on Ably.
When you're reading a topic, you'll see who else is also viewing it in real time, and you'll get a "is typing…" indicator when another member starts a reply. If a new reply is posted while you're reading, a live banner appears with a "Jump to latest" link so you don't have to refresh.
Database notifications also broadcast live now, so when something happens that you'd normally see on next page load, you'll get a toast immediately instead.
Themes & Layouts
There's a new Card post layout available in the theme editor. It's a more visual, contained style for posts and works well on boards that lean more towards conversation than dense forum threads.
Theme CSS now has a version history, which makes it much safer to iterate on a custom theme - you can roll back a change without having to keep notes on what the previous version looked like.
Mobile
The mobile experience has had a proper pass:
A new bottom tab bar for quick navigation between the main areas of the board.
A side drawer for everything that doesn't fit in the tab bar.
Mobile-tuned alerts and messages views so notifications and DMs are actually pleasant to deal with on a phone.
Topic & Post Improvements
The topic header has been tidied up, with cleaner "Go to topic listing" and "Next unread topic" links so navigating between threads in a busy forum is one click away.
Quick reply has had some polish too. The editor now starts in a collapsed state and expands when you click into it, which keeps the bottom of the page lighter when you're just reading.
Members List
The members list now has dynamic search - results update as you type rather than requiring a full page submit. Finding a specific member on larger boards should feel a lot snappier.
Widgets
A few new widgets have landed in this release:
Most viewed topics - surfaces the most-read topics over a configurable window.
Clubs list - a directory-style widget for the new Clubs feature.
Clubs content - shows recent activity from clubs the viewer is a member of.
All of them are managed from the widget manager in the same way as existing widgets.
Other Bits
A page-transition CSS module for slightly smoother navigation between pages. Making it look more like an app. A simple change but makes a great impact.
…and the usual round of bug fixes across the board.
There is probably some finetuning left to do now that everything is in production, but I'll tackle it as we go. As always, if anything looks off or behaves unexpectedly after this update, please report it in the support and bug forum. Feedback is always appreciated. 😁
