Everything you need to launch a working Community Forum Platform — prioritized by impact, sequenced by complexity. Built for Community builders, SaaS companies, open source projects, and niche knowledge communities who want to ship fast and own everything.
Not all features are equal. This checklist separates what you must launch with from what can wait — so you ship faster without cutting corners that matter.
Launch blockers — build these first
Hierarchical categories, pinned announcements, and nested reply threads
Upvote/downvote posts; mark accepted answers (Q&A mode) or best replies
Automatic trust level progression (new, basic, member, regular, leader) based on activity
Search across all posts and topics with relevance ranking
High value — ship in week 2
Award badges for contributions, streaks, and community milestones
Post-launch polish and extras
This checklist follows the 80/20 rule: the "Must Have" features deliver 80% of the user value with 20% of the total effort. Every item in the must-have column was chosen because it:
Solves the core problem Community builders, SaaS companies, open source projects, and niche knowledge communities face every day
Creates a complete user loop from onboarding to core action to outcome
Enables you to charge for the product or validate willingness to pay
Gives you meaningful metrics to improve with in v2
Can be shipped in 1 week with LaraCopilot
"The goal is not to build a perfect product. The goal is to build the minimum product that proves your assumption and earns your first users."
For a Community Forum Platform, that means shipping authentication, the core data model, one complete user workflow, and a way to collect feedback. Everything else is version 2. LaraCopilot makes this fast.
Use these ready-made prompts to build each must-have feature. Paste them directly into LaraCopilot and get production-ready code.
Build me a forum platform with categories, threaded discussions, voting, reactions, user trust levels and badges, full-text search, email digest notifications, and admin moderation tools
Feature: Feature
Add feature to my community forum platform. Include full CRUD, form validation, policy-based authorization, and a responsive Tailwind UI.
Feature: Feature
Add feature to my community forum platform. Include full CRUD, form validation, policy-based authorization, and a responsive Tailwind UI.
Feature: Feature
Add feature to my community forum platform. Include full CRUD, form validation, policy-based authorization, and a responsive Tailwind UI.
Feature: Feature
Add feature to my community forum platform. Include full CRUD, form validation, policy-based authorization, and a responsive Tailwind UI.
Here's how to sequence your Community Forum Platform build across 1 week using LaraCopilot. Follow this order and you'll have a shippable product every step of the way.
This checklist tells you what to build. LaraCopilot builds it. Paste any prompt above and get production-ready Laravel code — not a prototype, not a mockup. Real code you own.
Free to start. 100% code ownership. Launch in 1 week.