Cascade — a social-feed theme for Flarum 2 (free, MIT, and it needs testers)
I've been building this for a while and it's finally in a state worth showing people. Cascade turns your discussion list into a feed.
Flarum shows you a title, an avatar, a tag and a reply count. Facebook and X show you the post. That one difference is the whole idea: the opening post's text and pictures go on the card, reactions go on the card, the latest reply goes on the card, and the full conversation opens in a modal over the top of the feed — so you never lose your place in the list.
I was going to charge for this. I've decided not to. It's MIT, it's free, and it's staying free.
What it does
Two presets, picked in the admin.
- Wall — cards on a grey ground, dense chrome, a wide labelled action bar. Aimed at forums where most visitors 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.
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. This is fof/reactions doing the work; Cascade just draws it.
The conversation in a modal. Click the reply count and the whole discussion lifts over the feed — the full opening post, every reply, and a live typing indicator if you run flarum/realtime. The discussion page still exists and the modal links to it (it's the permalink every notification points at), you just rarely need it.
Also in there: an image mosaic that lays out 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5+ pictures the way a social feed does; inline See more / See less that grows the post's text without disturbing the images; a trending widget; and a proper dark mode.
And it works on a phone.
Install
composer require ernestdefoe/cascade
Then enable Cascade in your admin panel and pick a preset.
Requirements: Flarum 2.0.0-rc.8+, PHP 8.3+, and fof/reactions, which Composer pulls in for you.
About performance, since somebody will ask
The expensive way to build a feed is to put a whole post in every list row — and the core team removed firstPost from the discussion-list endpoint for exactly that reason (flarum/framework#4788). Cascade does not put it back.
It eager-loads the relation without serialising it, reads the stored formatter XML directly (parsed_content — never content, which unparses, or formatContent(), which renders), and ships a capped plain-text excerpt plus a few image URLs. Reaction counts come from the request-scoped memo fof/reactions already builds for every row's first post.
Net cost: two eager loads per page of discussions. No migration, no new tables, no extra requests.
It also gets along with
Cascade implements none of these itself — it detects what you have and decorates it, and renders nothing where an extension is missing.
flarum/tags — tag pills in the card's meta line. Tags normally float at tablet width with a 150 px cap, so a three-tag discussion shows one and a half of them; Cascade un-floats them so you see all of them.flarum/realtime — the typing indicator in the modal.fof/upload — attachments become the card's mosaic.fof/forum-widgets-core — your side widgets get adopted into Cascade's right rail instead of becoming a fourth column and blowing the layout out.ernestdefoe/mobile-tab — bottom tab bar on phones.
This is version 0.1.0, and that number is honest
It works. It runs daily on my own forum. But it has not met your forum yet — your extensions, your tags, your content — and that's where the bugs are going to be. A few I already know about:
- 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.
- Timeline has had less testing than Wall.
- The modal's reply button opens Flarum's real composer rather than an inline comment box.
- English only, though every string is translatable — there's no hardcoded text anywhere.
Please install it and break it. That's genuinely what this release is for. If something looks wrong, a screenshot plus your Flarum version, your enabled extensions and which preset you're on will get it fixed fast.
Links
Thanks for taking a look. 🌊
