On the SitePoint PHP Blog Jeff Smith introduces Flarum, a project that bills itself as "forums made simple" that's easy to set up and includes both the standard features you'd expect from a forum and some interesting "power" ones as well.

Flarum is a forums solution that is currently in public beta and is under active development. Today we’re going to take a look at it, get it set up in a Homestead Improved Vagrant virtual machine, and look at the configuration and the features that Flarum offers. Then, we’ll compare it to some other forums platforms to see how it stacks up at a glance.

They start with a bit of environment setup including the creation of the Homestead virtual machine. The tutorial then roughly follows the installation guide and helps you get the software installed, the web server configured and configuring the software via the Admin interface. They help you set up some of the basics, permissions, change the appearance of the site and work with tags and extensions. They get more into this last topic, introducing some of the things you can customize in the layout and links to more information on both extensions and themes. The post ends with a brief overview of some of the general features that the forum offers including it being touch friendly, "friendly" URLs and easy moderation functionality.