Flatboard 5.3.0 — Lighthouse 🏠
We are pleased to announce Flatboard 5.3.0 "Lighthouse". This release marks an important milestone for the Pro edition: FlatHome officially joins the Flatboard Pro plugin pack, replacing EasyPages. It also ships a series of refinements and bug fixes that improve the FlatHome experience across all configurations.
✨ New: FlatHome joins Flatboard Pro
Starting with 5.3.0, FlatHome is the CMS plugin included in Flatboard Pro, replacing EasyPages.
FlatHome is a generational step beyond EasyPages. Where EasyPages provided simple Markdown pages, FlatHome delivers:
- A full CMS page system with Markdown or WYSIWYG editor, PHP templates, page groups, and multilingual menu labels
- A complete blog engine — forum discussions become blog articles with hero banners, author info, tags, estimated read time, and AJAX comments
- A landing page template (
home) with hero section, feature chips, join cards, and a live blog preview - A navigation builder — drag-and-drop reordering of all nav items, including dropdown groups
- A contact form template — ready-to-use, translated in 5 languages
- Presence integration — the presence indicator correctly labels blog and CMS page visitors
Existing EasyPages users: your pages can be recreated in FlatHome. Slugs, Markdown content, and menu placement all map directly. Once your pages are migrated, you can uninstall EasyPages — the plugin will not receive further updates.
🏠 FlatHome — Generic landing page template
The home.php template has been rewritten as a clean, site-agnostic landing page that works for any Flatboard installation — not just forums. It shows the site name, your CMS page content as lead text (with a helpful default pointing to the admin when the page is empty), and optional CTA buttons for the forum and/or blog. An accent band uses your theme's primary colour. Recent blog posts and recent forum discussions each get their own section — both are hidden automatically when the corresponding feature is disabled or has no content.
⬆️ Flatboard update made simple
You no longer need FTP or SSH to update Flatboard. Admin → Updates accepts a Flatboard archive, verifies its integrity, creates a full automatic backup, then applies the files in a guided step-by-step UI. Your stockage/, uploads/, and .htaccess are never touched. plugin.json and theme.json files are merged (not overwritten), so your plugin settings and theme colours are preserved across updates.
📦 Install plugins and themes from a ZIP
Admin → Plugins and Admin → Themes now each have an Install button. Drop in a ZIP archive, and Flatboard validates the structure, extracts the plugin or theme into the right directory, and activates the caches. No FTP required.
🗑️ Clean plugin uninstallation
Plugins can now be fully removed from Admin → Plugins with a single click. The uninstaller runs the plugin's own cleanup hooks, removes its permissions from the permission table, clears asset and translation caches, and deletes the plugin directory. No leftover entries in plugins.enabled or stale permission keys.
🔧 Bug fixes
Blog category not hidden from forum (SQLite)
When using SQLite storage, enabling Hide blog category from forum had no effect — the blog category and its discussions remained visible in the forum index. Fixed with a new discussions.index.filter hook in DiscussionController::index() that strips blog discussions from the feed before rendering, regardless of the storage backend.
"Users" link missing from navbar
When FlatHome's Navigation order panel listed "Users", the link did not appear in the site navbar. A CSS rule designed to hide the core hardcoded link was also matching FlatHome's re-injected link because they share the same href. Fixed with a :not([data-fh]) selector so only the core duplicate is suppressed.
Spurious "Comment published!" toast on blog article visit
A success toast ("✓ Succès / Comment published!") appeared on every blog article page load, even without posting a comment. The toast.js fallback scanner was picking up the hidden #flathome-reply-success element (always in the DOM with display:none) because it scans all .alert.alert-success elements regardless of visibility. Fixed with data-toast="none" on both the success and error inline alert divs.
🪝 New hook: discussions.index.filter
Third-party plugins can now filter or remove discussions from the all-discussions forum feed by registering the discussions.index.filter hook in DiscussionController::index(). The hook receives the discussions array by reference. See docs/8-plugins.md for details.
⬆️ Updating
From the admin panel(recommended)
Go to Admin → Updates, upload the 5.3.0 archive, and click Apply update. Flatboard will verify the archive, create a full automatic backup, and deploy the files in a guided step-by-step UI — no FTP or SSH needed.
Manually
Extract the archive over your installation, preserving stockage/, uploads/, and your .htaccess. Clear the cache after updating.
No database migration or configuration change is required.
📋 Full changelog
The complete changelog with all technical details is available in full changelog thread.
Thank you to everyone who reported bugs and contributed to this release. 🙏
