esoTalk is being succeeded by Flarum. Flarum has the same philosophy as esoTalk — fast, simple, powerful — but is being built on a better technical foundation.

Flarum will be ready for beta in a few months. There will be an easy migration path from esoTalk to Flarum.

In the meantime, esoTalk will get bugfix releases as necessary, relying on help from the community.

As Flarum becomes stable, esoTalk will be discontinued.

What's wrong with esoTalk?

esoTalk is great, but its codebase is unsustainable. It is built on a custom pseudo-framework which means a lot of wheels are being reinvented. Its potential is limited by the many inherent flaws of this approach. This is a fundamental issue that is addressed in Flarum.

Should I use esoTalk?

If you can't wait for Flarum, you can still use esoTalk now. We will ensure that there is an easy migration path from esoTalk to Flarum.

A few months ago, we announced Flarum — beautiful new forum software — in the form of a Kickstarter campaign. Within a week, based on a lot of feedback and some careful consideration, we decided to pull the plug on the Kickstarter. Instead, we pledged to develop Flarum collaboratively as an open-source project.

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Update: We’re cancelling the Kickstarter, in favour of openly and collaboratively building Flarum on GitHub. Read more about it here.

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After a huge amount of work over the past couple of months, gamma 4 is finally ready. This release contains a large number of enhancements, bug-fixes, and breaking API changes.

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Recently, I decided to make finishing esoTalk's developer documentation a priority. Even though the future is Flarum, I think esoTalk can still benefit from a bit of third-party development love.

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