README

A modern community forum application built with PHP 8.2 and VortexPHP. It includes discussions, moderation tools, private messaging, notifications, and responsive UI workflows for day-to-day community management.

Performance

Typical forum page render benchmark: 2.99 ms.

VortexPHP is optimized for very low-latency page delivery.

Features

User accounts: registration, login, logout, profile pages, and account settings.
Structured forum: categories, thread creation, threaded replies, pagination, and tags.
Rich post flow: markdown rendering, inline post editing, and post likes.
Thread management: bookmark/unbookmark threads and a dedicated bookmarks page.
Moderation controls: lock, pin/sticky, and delete thread/post actions for moderators.
Safety and abuse prevention: CSRF protection, auth middleware, role guards, and request throttling.
Community tools: report/flag thread and post endpoints.
Notifications: in-app notifications list with read-state handling.
Private messages: inbox, conversation view, async feed endpoint, and async send endpoint.
Search helpers: suggestion endpoint for faster content discovery.
Localization: multi-language support (en, bg) via translation files.
Admin panel at /admin (vortexphp/admin): CRUD for categories, tags, posts, and users via app/Admin/Resources (see config/admin.php). User passwords are hashed on create/update (App\Observers\UserPasswordObserver).

Tech Stack

Backend: PHP 8.2, VortexPHP framework, vortexphp/admin
Frontend: Twig templates, Tailwind CSS 4
Content parsing: league/commonmark
Database: SQLite by default (configurable via .env)

Quick Start

1) Install dependencies

composer install
npm install

2) Configure environment

cp .env.example .env

Set values in .env (minimum required):

APP_KEY (generate a secure random key)
APP_URL
DB_DRIVER / DB_DATABASE (or MySQL/PostgreSQL variables if used)

3) Run migrations

composer run migrate

4) Build assets

npm run build

After composer install / update, package assets (including admin CSS) are published into public/ automatically. To run that step manually: composer run publish-assets.

For local CSS watch mode:

npm run dev

5) Start the application

composer run serve

Available Composer Scripts

composer run publish-assets - copy vortex package assets (e.g. public/css/admin.css)
composer run serve - start local development server
composer run migrate - apply database migrations
composer run migrate:down - rollback last migration batch
composer run test - run test suite
composer run doctor - run environment diagnostics
composer run smoke - run smoke checks