Gridiron Nation

ernestdefoe · 2026-05-27T18:35:52+00:00

I built this theme to use on my FBS Football site but releasing it in case someone else has a football site and wants to use it. Will include options later to allow the live score ticker to pick other leagues like the NFL, etc at a later time. GridIron Nation 🏈 A Flarum 2 theme for college football fan forums. Crimson palette, DM Sans, stadium-scoreboard hero, showcase-card discussion list with clickable likes, ticket-stub post layout, live ESPN score ticker, recruit board, full dark mode. Renamed from ernestdefoe/fbsfb. v2.x ships as ernestdefoe/gridiron-nation (kebab-case, matches the rest of the ernestdefoe/* family). Upgraders: the package rename is handled by a settings-table migration that copies the legacy fbsfb.* / ernestdefoe-fbsfb.* rows under the new prefixes on first boot. Old rows stay in place so a rollback to v1 keeps working. Screenshots Homepage — Light Mode Homepage — Dark Mode Discussion Page — Light Mode Discussion Page — Dark Mode Screenshots are auto-generated by scripts/screenshots.mjs (puppeteer-core against flarum.test). Run after a UI change: node scripts/screenshots.mjs if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } Features 🏟 Stadium Hero Scoreboard stats row — MEMBERS, TOPICS, POSTS, ONLINE, NEWEST. ONLINE opens a dropdown of who's around right now; NEWEST exposes the most recently registered user. Composer trigger — pill-shaped "Tell everyone what you're working on…" that opens the New Discussion composer. Reads as the primary affordance on the homepage. Pill nav row — rendered below the hero gradient (not inside it) so the chips read on the page background. Welcome hero forced visible — the per-visitor dismiss flag is honoured by Flarum core; we override it to keep the themed hero on for everyone, but the admin's empty-welcomeTitle escape hatch still hides it. 🃏 Showcase Discussion List Standalone reimplementation built from Flarum 2 primitives — no ramon/avocado dependency required. Each row renders as a card with: Author avatar + name + relative time + tag pills + Reply button Bold title (highlighted on search hits) Two-line excerpt pulled from the OP Embedded last-reply preview chip (avatar + author + snippet) "See N other replies" overflow link Footer stats row (likes + replies, ICU-pluralised) Crimson yard-line accent strip down the left edge for unread / sticky rows; muted strip on read rows Locked rows get a subtle treatment so they don't disappear 📝 Post Playcard Posts on the discussion page get card chrome with the same yard-line accent — crimson on the OP, muted on replies. Built on top of Flarum 2's native Post grid (no layout overrides), so it survives core updates and plays nicely with any extension that injects controls, reactions, or social-groups extras into the Post body. 📺 Live Scores Ticker Proxies ESPN's public college-football scoreboard endpoint — no API key required. Renders as a horizontal scrolling ticker above the discussion list, with up to 6 game cards sorted Live → Scheduled → Final. Pulsing green LIVE badge with quarter + clock detail. Winning score highlighted in crimson. Server-side cache: 60 seconds (visitors don't hammer ESPN). Refreshes client-side every 60 seconds. Graceful fallback — shows "Scores unavailable" if ESPN times out. ⭐ Top Recruits Widget Pulls live recruiting data from the ernestdefoe/recruiting extension when installed. Without that extension, the widget hides itself. Headshots via On3 photo enrichment. CollegeFootballData.com is the source of truth — set your API key in the GridIron Nation Recruiting admin panel. Crimson position badge (QB, WR, DT …), star rating, school slot. 🔥 Trending Widget Five most-recently-active discussions straight from Flarum's store (no extra API round-trip). Rank 1–2 in crimson, rest in muted grey. Reply count + relative time per row. 🎯 Hero Tag Decoration Anchors up to two large, semi-transparent FontAwesome glyphs to the right side of every tagged discussion's hero, pulled from the secondary tag's icon (set per-tag in the Flarum Tags admin panel). Falls back to any tag with an icon if no secondary candidates exist — flat tag setups still get decoration. All three knobs (enabled, icon count, opacity 0–100) are admin-configurable. 🌙 Dark Mode Full [data-theme^="dark"] + system prefers-color-scheme: dark support. Surfaces shift from #0c0d10 through #16171c cards to #0f1013 inset areas (inputs, blockquotes, code blocks). Primary shifts to #e05c5c for legibility on dark backgrounds. Cascade-correct: dark block lives last in the stylesheet, no specificity fights. 🎨 Design System Crimson primary (#B22222) with #8B0000 dark + #d94f4f light variants. DM Sans Variable loaded from Google Fonts, replaces Flarum's default font throughout. 14 px organic border-radius on cards, dropdowns, modals, buttons, and inputs. CSS custom properties for --primary-color, --body-bg, --control-bg, --border-color, etc. — overlaying themes and ramon/colored compose cleanly. Installation Via Composer composer require ernestdefoe/gridiron-nation php flarum migrate php flarum cache:clear if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } Manual Download or clone this repo into extensions/ernestdefoe-gridiron-nation/ Run composer install in the Flarum root Run php flarum migrate Run php flarum cache:clear Enable GridIron Nation in the Flarum admin panel JS is pre-compiled. js/dist/forum.js and js/dist/admin.js are committed — no local build step needed for a vanilla install. Requirements | Dependency | Version | |---|---| | PHP | ^8.3 | | Flarum | ^2.0 | | guzzlehttp/guzzle | ^7.0 | Optional, but recommended | Extension | Why | |---|---| | ernestdefoe/recruiting | Powers the Top Recruits widget with live CFBD data + On3 photo headshots. Without it, the widget hides. | | ramon/colored | Per-tag color tinting on hero + discussion-list borders. GridIron Nation wires data-colored-border=left/full cleanly against the showcase card and yard-line accent. | | flarum/realtime | Live discussion-list / notification / typing-indicator updates over a websocket. We hide the "N updates available" banner so the list refreshes silently. | Admin Settings Under Extensions → GridIron Nation in the Flarum admin panel: | Setting | Default | Purpose | |---|---|---| | widget_live_scores | true | Show the Live Scores ticker | | widget_trending | true | Show the Trending sidebar widget | | widget_top_recruits | true | Show the Top Recruits sidebar widget | | hero_deco_enabled | true | Render FontAwesome glyph decoration on discussion heroes | | hero_deco_icon_count | 2 | 1 or 2 icons (2-icon mode requires ≥ 768 px viewport) | | hero_deco_opacity | 35 | Glyph opacity, 0–100 (set to 0 to hide without disabling) | API Endpoints | Method | Path | Description | |---|---|---| | GET | /api/gn-live-scores | ESPN scoreboard proxy (public, 60 s cache) | | GET | /api/gn-online | Users online in last 5 min (auth-aware, per-actor cache) | The retired /api/gn-recruits endpoints from v1.x have been removed — recruit data now comes from ernestdefoe/recruiting's /api/cfbd-recruits endpoint when that extension is installed. Building JS from source cd js npm install npm run build # production npm run dev # watch mode if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } Upgrading from ernestdefoe/fbsfb (v1.x) The composer rename forces Flarum to treat this as a fresh extension ID. To upgrade: composer remove ernestdefoe/fbsfb composer require ernestdefoe/gridiron-nation php flarum migrate # runs the settings copy migration php flarum cache:clear php flarum extension:enable ernestdefoe-gridiron-nation if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } The settings migration copies every fbsfb.* and ernestdefoe-fbsfb.* row in your settings table to the new gridiron-nation.* and ernestdefoe-gridiron-nation.* prefixes. Legacy rows stay in place so a downgrade picks them back up cleanly. License MIT © ernestdefoe

ernestdefoe

gridiron-nation 2.3.2

Fixed on phones

The post card's punch-holes no longer bite into text. At full size they reached further into the card than a phone's padding, and the left one clipped the first letter of lines level with it. They're smaller below tablet width.

composer require ernestdefoe/gridiron-nation:^2.3.2
php flarum cache:clear

View release on GitHub

ernestdefoe

gridiron-nation 2.3.3

Sidebar widgets fetch once

Part of a performance pass across all my Flarum extensions: nothing should cost more work as a page gets busier.

Fixed

The Live Scores, Trending and Top Recruits widgets share one cached copy per page. Going back to the index no longer refetches them, polling stops in hidden tabs, and a missing recruits extension is no longer asked again and again.
Much smaller download. A node_modules folder used only by the screenshot script had been committed and shipped with every install; it's gone.

composer require ernestdefoe/gridiron-nation:^2.3
php flarum cache:clear

View release on GitHub

ernestdefoe

gridiron-nation 2.3.4

Lighter live scores

Team crests used to download as ESPN's full 500-pixel originals, even where they're drawn at a few dozen pixels. They now download at twice their display size, so they stay sharp on high-resolution screens, and look identical.

Fixed

Live-score crests download at display size (about 30 KB → 2 KB each).

composer require ernestdefoe/gridiron-nation:^2.3
php flarum cache:clear

View release on GitHub

ernestdefoe

gridiron-nation 2.3.5

A lighter stylesheet

Fixed

The theme's stylesheet is 13.1 KB smaller (its share of forum.css went from 61.7 to 48.6 KB). A 12 KB copy of the dark theme was written for a case Flarum never produces, so it never applied. Styles for parts of the theme that are no longer shown were removed too. Dark mode and every page look exactly as before.

composer require ernestdefoe/gridiron-nation:^2.3
php flarum cache:clear

View release on GitHub

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