Bulbs is an open-source message board / forum platform built with Python and the Pyramid web framework.
It is designed to be lightweight, easy to deploy, and highly extendable—providing a clean foundation for custom forums, community boards, or embedded discussion systems.
Bulbs is a minimal and developer-friendly discussion board system.
It focuses on clarity, customizability, and performance, offering:
- Threaded topics and post handling
- Clean routing via Pyramid
- Integration with PostgreSQL
- A structure that makes it easy to extend features such as:
- user permissions
- moderation tools
- custom themes
- rich text editors
- API endpoints
The goal of Bulbs is to provide a simple but powerful base for any forum-style application.
- Python 3.4+
- Pyramid
- PostgreSQL
- Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
Install the Bulbs package
python setup.py develop
Start the development server
pserve development.ini --reload
Configure the database
Open your browser and navigate to /install
Complete the setup screen to initialize and configure your database.
Planned features and future improvements:
- Remove special characters from slug generation
- Fix the issue where forward slashes in usernames break the profile page
- Webhook support
- Plugin system for adding new modules
- REST API for external applications
- Improved authentication system (password resets, email verification)
- Extended slug generation rules and localization support
- Optional Markdown or rich-text editor for posts
- Customizable themes / CSS templates
- Better mobile responsiveness
- User roles and permissions
- Post reporting & moderation queue
- Thread locking / pinning
Contributions are welcome! To contribute:
- Fork the repository
- Create a feature branch
- Make your changes
- Submit a pull request with a clear explanation
Bug reports, ideas, and feature requests are also appreciated.
See the LICENSE file for full details.