Developer boards
A developer board is a free sandbox forum with every plan feature unlocked, made for building and testing extensions before you submit them for review.
Requesting one
Sign in with your ForumSpark account and open Developer board in the portal. Pick a name and subdomain and tell us in a sentence or two what you are building. Requests are reviewed by hand; you get an email when yours is approved or declined, and an approved board is provisioned immediately. One developer board per account.
Sandbox limits
Developer boards are workbenches, not free production forums:
- Search engines are kept out: forced noindex, a disallowing robots.txt, and an empty sitemap.
- No custom domains and no payment provider connections.
- Up to 25 members and 1 GB of storage.
- A visible "Developer board" banner on every page.
- Boards idle for 90 days are suspended automatically, with a warning email at 80 days. Any new post resets the clock.
Everything else works exactly like a real board on the highest plan, so what you build behaves the same after publishing.
Sideloading packages
The main reason developer boards exist: Admin panel → Extensions → Install from file. Upload any package JSON (template add-on, theme, widget, or script) and it validates and installs through the same pipeline as directory installs, without needing review first. Re-uploading the same package updates it in place, and you uninstall it like any extension. Sideloaded drafts never appear in the public directory.
Verbose template errors
On a normal board, a template that fails at render time silently falls back to the stock design. On a developer board, admins see an inline error box naming the outlet, the snippet, and the error, right where the output would have been, so you can iterate without digging through admin notices. Members always get the silent fallback.