The last one is not exactly a forum, but a comment service, but it can be used as a forum combined with Kirby pages.
But I agree that there are too few plugins around this topic. Even if it’s a big forum system, a plugin would make it easier to add the forum to the site.
Sounds like a big thing. If you need some kind of Kirby approach https://github.com/Addpixel/KirbyComments seems like a good start. For the users to create topics, you would need to create pages from the outside and use these pages as placeholders for Kirby Comments. Then every page would be a forum topic, kind of.
For a simple forum that would probably work. For more features I would not recommend to build it yourself. It might be a huge thing to create.
you are right. the biggest hiccup would be the user registration/CRUD, double opt-in mail and so on…
i’ve made a comments plugin that adds comments as a structure to a article. Would also work for a forum but the search will not find anything there… have to rethink the problem.
ATM i try to extract the forum part from the github repo mentioned above…
As I already said in the other thread: it’s been in beta state for ages and I wonder if it will ever get out of beta… 0.1.0 beta 6 is the latest release, and that is from October last year!
Flarum is good. Its “beta” but already it is better than esotalk which is from same author. Esotalk is also great.
Hosting discourse is much harder and its not exactly minimal. There is also nodebb but its node js. Try flarum if it has missing features you need go esotalk. I wouldnt even consider kirby.