Hi Product Hunt! I built Flatbb because every forum I tried wanted Composer, Node or Docker before it would show a single topic, and the people I was building for only had cheap shared hosting and an FTP client. So Flatbb is plain PHP with no framework, no Composer and no build step. You unzip a folder, open the URL, and a short installer asks for SQLite or MySQL and an admin account. That is the whole deployment. The part I am most excited about is plugins. A plugin is one folder with one manifest, and the entire plugin API is documented in a single text file. Paste it into Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, describe what you want, and you get back a folder you upload in the admin panel. There is a marketplace with one-click installs, and anyone can publish to it. It is free and MIT licensed. I would love to hear where it breaks for you.

Flatbb

Free open-source forum you install by unzipping a folder

Free open-source forum you install by unzipping a folder