A social-feed theme for Flarum 2. Your discussion list stops being a list of links and becomes a feed: the opening post's text and pictures on the card, reactions, the latest reply, and the whole conversation in a modal over the top of it — without ever leaving the page you were reading.
[!WARNING] This is an early public test build (0.1.x). It works, it is in daily use on one forum, and it is going to have bugs I have not seen. That is exactly why it is out here. Please break it and tell me what broke.
What it actually does
Flarum shows you a title, an avatar, a tag and a reply count. A social feed shows you the post. That one difference is what Cascade is built around.
The opening post on the card — an excerpt, an image mosaic, the latest reply, all in the discussion list.
Reactions on the card, with the hover picker you already know: the emoji row unfurls, each one grows under the pointer and names itself, the one you pick lands with a pop. Long-press on touch.
See more / See less expands the post's text in place — it grows what is there, it does not swap the card for something else.
The conversation in a modal over the feed. The discussion page still exists (it is the permalink every notification and search result points at) and the modal links to it, but you rarely need it.
Live typing indicator inside that modal, when flarum/realtime is on.
Two presets — pick one in the admin:
| | | |---|---| | Wall | Cards on a grey ground, dense chrome, a wide labelled action bar. For forums whose visitors mostly lurk and need the affordance spelled out. | | Timeline | No cards. One 600 px column between hairlines, a sticky tab strip, a quiet action bar. For busy forums where row count matters more. |
Screenshots
Dark
The reaction picker
The conversation modal
The Timeline preset
On a phone
<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ernestdefoe/cascade/main/docs/screenshots/mobile.png" alt="Cascade on a phone" width="320">
Install
composer require ernestdefoe/cascade
Then enable Cascade in your admin panel, and pick a preset under its settings.
Requirements
| | | |---|---| | Flarum | 2.0.0-rc.8 or newer | | PHP | 8.3+ | | Required | fof/reactions — Composer pulls it in |
fof/reactions currently has no stable 2.x release, so Composer resolves it at beta. That needs no special flags: every Flarum 2 install already runs with a relaxed minimum-stability, because Flarum 2 itself is a release candidate.
Colour
Cascade deliberately adds no accent-colour setting. Your forum already has one under Appearance, and Flarum computes button contrast colours from it at compile time — a second accent would recolour half the page and leave the other half pointing at the old one. Wall reads best around #1877F2, Timeline around #1D9BF0.
Extensions it works with
Cascade implements none of these itself. It detects what you have and decorates it; with any of them absent, the matching piece of UI is simply not rendered.
| Extension | What it adds | |---|---| | fof/reactions | The reaction control and the hover picker. Required. | | flarum/tags | Tag pills in the card's meta line — un-floated so you see all of them, not the first one and a half | | flarum/realtime | The typing indicator in the conversation modal | | fof/upload | Attachments become the card's image mosaic | | fof/forum-widgets-core | Side widgets are adopted into Cascade's right rail rather than becoming a fourth column | | ernestdefoe/mobile-tab | Bottom tab bar on phones |
Settings
Five, in the extension's own admin page:
Preset — Wall or Timeline
What each row shows — excerpt and image / excerpt only / title only
Excerpt length — 40 to 600 characters
Trending widget — tags ranked by discussions actually started recently, recomputed hourly (never read from tags.discussion_count, which drifts)
Engagement bar — auto / always / hidden
Performance
The thing that makes a feed expensive is putting a whole post in every list row, and Flarum's core team removed firstPost from the discussion-list endpoint for exactly that reason (flarum/framework#4788). Cascade does not put it back.
Instead it eager-loads the relation without serialising it and reads the stored formatter XML directly — parsed_content, never content (which unparses) or formatContent() (which renders) — shipping a capped plain-text excerpt and a handful of image URLs. Reaction counts come from the request-scoped memo fof/reactions already primes for every row's first post.
Net cost: two eager loads per page of discussions. No migration, no new tables, no extra requests.
Known gaps in 0.1
Being honest about what is not done yet:
The discussion page is only lightly restyled. The modal is the intended path; the full page still looks close to stock.
Mobile works but has had less attention than desktop.
The modal's reply button opens Flarum's real composer rather than an inline comment box.
The Timeline preset has had less testing than Wall.
Only English ships, though every string is translatable — no hardcoded text.
Reporting bugs
Please do. Open an issue, or post on the support forum.
What helps most: your Flarum version, which other extensions are enabled, the preset and colour scheme you were in, and a screenshot.
Licence
MIT. Free, and free to stay free — use it, fork it, ship it in something else.
