nodeBB VS maud

> I'm a big fan of https://nodebb.org/

TIL to what shit Netgate moved pfSense forums to. I'm glad you are fine with it, but not only my FullHD monitor is not a smartphone, so I don't need 400% fonts on everything (and post dates on the faaaaar right clearly shows nobody ever even used the forum) and most importantly - search doesn't work. It's not like the previous forum had a good search, but at least it worked.

Bonus point: try to Ctrl+mousewheel on any NodeBB (including the official one).

NodeBB

You said it's based on. This means that there are modifications to the implementation of nodebb. So where is your modifications' source code then? stackfoss/stackfoss is just a single readme file

Obviously forums aren't as popular as they used to be, so this topic might not be of interest to many. For folks that want to run a forum, they'd most certainly go with Discourse (Ruby), Flarum (PHP), Xenforo (PHP), NodeBB (Javascript), Nimforum (Nim) and maybe Casnode (Go)

If you want to make your own app out of custom code that you will actively develop new features for, I think your points are true. But if you just wanted a modern version of the old phpBB forums, there are plenty of almost-turnkey projects/templates you can use. Check out NodeBB for instance. Maybe the barrier for entry is higher in a way, given increased complexity, but you also get more and nicer features "for free". I think it's a wash.

I was looking into actively maintained Rust based forum software similar to NodeBB (Node.js) or Discourse (Ruby on Rails) and Flaskbb (Python).

package: name: nodebb version: 2.5.3 dependencies: runtime: - nodejs environment: contents: packages: - alpine-baselayout - ca-certificates-bundle - nodejs - npm - git pipeline: - uses: fetch with: uri: https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/archive/refs/tags/v${{package.version}}.tar.gz expected-sha256: 92e390d7cda190e7f098833cbbbf03fbe1c50f25653656ad589ae97dc18a7684 strip-components: 0 - runs: | mkdir -p "${{targets.destdir}}/usr/share/nodebb" cd NodeBB-${{package.version}} cp install/package.json . npm install --omit=dev cp -a ./. "${{targets.destdir}}/usr/share/nodebb"

I would like to mention maud in this context:

https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

It is refreshingly different from other Rust templating libraries. It uses a proc-macro that compiles your HTML into Rust code. I also happen to use it in conjunction with HTMX and it works very well for me (at least in small projects).

You can also use HTML templating with crates like askama, tera and maud! This can be combined with the power of lightweight JavaScript libraries like htmx to speed up time to production. You can read more about this on our other article about using HTMX with Rust which you can find here.. We also collaborated with Stefan Baumgartner on an article for serving HTML with Askama!

I think a lot of us reach for Jinja-style templates so it feels a little more like we're writing bare HTML. But they're of course still just templates, and they need a build step before they become valid HTML.

So it's true, if you're willing to use a DSL embedded in your server language (like JSX), then you'll have the full language tooling available to you. And this probably isn't giving up much over language-specific templates.

A JSX-equivalent for the Rust server-side rendering world would probably be maud [1] or leptops [2].

[1] https://github.com/lambda-fairy/maud

[2] https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos

Maud as a performant templating engine that will ensure your templates are well-formed at compile-time and, in effect, minify the generated HTML output by not passing through unnecessary whitespace.

Maud is a fast Slim/Haml-esque templating engine which will automatically minify your HTML at no extra charge because whitespace isn't significant in its syntax.

If you want to do backend development, give actix-web or Axum a try. If you need templating, take a look at Maud and if you want an ORM, take a look at SeaORM.

Personally, I'd recommend Maud if you don't need something with runtime reloading. Not only is it much faster, it implements a template language that is effectively the Rust-syntax equivalent to Slim or Haml using a procedural macro, so you get compile-time verification that your HTML output is well-formed.

For templating, Maud is fast, gives compile-time well-formedness guarantees, and outputs minified HTML by default as a side-effect of it being based on Rust macros. (It's of a similar design philosophy to Slim and Haml)