Welcome to Flatboard 👋

Flatboard is a PHP 8 forum that runs without a database server. We built it to be simple without being basic — the kind of software that gets out of your way and lets your community do its thing, whether you're running a small hobby group or something much bigger.

Flatboard Home

Current Version

Flatboard 5.4.1 — LIGHTHOUSE · Released 2026-04-02

So, what is Flatboard exactly?

It's the latest generation of our forum software, rebuilt from scratch on PHP 8 with one goal in mind: fast and easy to extend. Just a solid foundation you can build on, without the complexity you don't need.

It's lightweight enough to run on modest hardware, and designed so that both users and admins can find their way around without reading a manual.

What can it do?

For your community:

  • Full topic creation and discussion management
  • Markdown support so posts can be properly formatted
  • Categories and tags to keep things organized
  • User profiles with comprehensive account management
  • Emoji reactions, notifications, and moderation tools
  • Two-factor authentication and other security features

For you, as an admin:

  • A clean control panel that doesn't overwhelm you
  • A plugin system so you can extend functionality without touching core code
  • A theme system so the forum looks the way you want it to
  • Built-in analytics to keep an eye on how things are going

What's in the Pro edition?

Flatboard Pro builds on the same core, adding optional features for more advanced use cases. Nothing is required, you can keep things minimal or opt in as needed.

Here's what you get out of the box:

The Premium theme is a fully-customizable theme that goes well beyond the default — four layout styles, four navbar styles, four card styles, configurable border radius, avatar shape, sidebar position, animation levels, parallax, gradients, and a complete dark/light color system built on CSS variables. All of it controllable from the admin panel, no code required.

The Analytics dashboard adds a dedicated section to the admin panel with visit KPI cards, a 30-day traffic chart, top pages ranking, a traffic sources table, growth comparisons, engagement ratios, and content health indicators — all GDPR-friendly with no IP storage.

FlatHome transforms Flatboard into a complete web platform — CMS pages, a blog engine with AJAX comments, a drag-and-drop navigation builder, and PHP templates including a ready-made landing page and contact form. You can even run it as a pure CMS with the forum and blog disabled entirely.

FlatSEO is a complete SEO toolkit: title and meta management at every level, Open Graph and Twitter cards, JSON-LD structured data, an auto-generated XML sitemap, a robots.txt editor, redirect manager, Google Analytics 4 and Tag Manager integration, an automated SEO audit, and breadcrumbs on all public pages.

TUI Editor is a modern dual-mode Markdown/WYSIWYG editor — switch between the two at any time, with image uploads, YouTube and TikTok embeds, a visual table editor, emoji picker, autosave, and per-context toolbar configuration.

Private Messaging adds a full inbox system — inbox, sent, and drafts views, read receipts, typing indicators, message search, file attachments, email notifications, a user block list, and configurable limits on message length and inbox size.

Forum Monitoring gives admins a real-time dashboard to track activity over up to 365 days, spot top users and top discussions, and get alerted when anomalies or suspicious patterns are detected.

Storage Migrator lets you switch between JSON and SQLite storage backends at any time through a guided admin interface — no manual database work, no downtime, with the original data preserved until the migration is confirmed.

The Community edition already includes EasyMDE and Logger, which carry over into Pro as well.

Under the hood

Flatboard runs on PHP 8.0+, stores data in SQLite or JSON (no heavy database setup required), and uses standard HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript on the frontend. Content is formatted with Markdown Extra.

The dependency list is short by design — only libraries that are lightweight, well-established, and GPLv3-compatible made the cut:

PHP side: PHPMailer, Parsedown, and the Stripe PHP SDK (used only within the resource manager on flatboard.org).

JavaScript side: Bootstrap 5.3.8, Font Awesome 7.2.0, EasyMDE, CodeMirror, Highlight.js, and Sortable.js.

Architecture

Architecture diagram

The people behind it

Flatboard wouldn't be where it is today without the community around it. Thank you to everyone who files bug reports, translates the interface, and helps make the project better every day. 🙏

Special thanks to arpinux for a huge number of bug reports that led to major stability improvements, and to JPRuehmann for ongoing reports and general improvements.

On the translation front: JPRuehmann covers German, Thalles handles Portuguese, and magu maintains the Simplified Chinese translation.

License

Flatboard 5 is free software, released under the GNU General Public License v3.

You’re free to use it, study it, modify it, and redistribute it.
If you improve it, you’re encouraged to share your changes.

Full details at gnu.org/licenses.

Useful links

Flatboard — Because Simple is Better.
Flatboard Pro — Because Simple is Better, and Better can still be Pro.