README

A Reddit-inspired theme for Flarum 2. Compact posts on a dark ground, a vote pill under each one, image and text previews, Hot / New / Top sorting, a collapsible rail, and genuinely threaded comments.

Free and MIT, like Cascade.

What it does

Posts, not rows. No cards and no borders — each post sits on the ground, separated by a hairline, and lifts on hover.
A vote pill at the foot of every post and every comment, which fills with the vote's colour once you pick a side.
Previews. A post leads with its first image, or with its opening lines when it has none. Never both: a row carrying a picture and three lines of prose is taller than two rows that each carry one.
Hot and Top in the sort control, with Hot as the default.
A collapsible left rail that hands its width back to the feed.
An About panel, and a hashtag cloud when Hashtags is installed.
Threaded comments, below.

Threading, with nothing to migrate

Replies nest under the comment they answer, with a collapse control on any post that has children.

🚨 There is no new table and no backfill. flarum/mentions has recorded the reply graph in post_mentions_post every time somebody quoted or replied to a post since 2015. Warren reads that, so a forum that has been running for years threads its whole history the moment the theme is enabled — which is not true of any design that starts recording a parent from today.

Without flarum/mentions every discussion simply renders flat.

It shares fof/gamification's votes on purpose

Warren does not keep its own vote table. It reads and writes post_votes and the score and ranking columns on discussions — the same ones fof/gamification has used since 2019.

That means:

Start on Warren's voting, install gamification later — every vote is still there, and its ranks, notifications and per-user point totals start working on the history you already have. It recomputes those totals by summing the whole table, so nothing needs backfilling.
Already using gamification — Warren shows those votes from the first page load, and stands its own voting down so you never see two vote controls on one post.
Remove Warren — your votes are untouched.

There is no export, no import command and no reconciliation step, because there is never a second copy of the data to reconcile.

Why the schema looks a decade old

Warren creates post_votes in gamification's 2019 shape — id, post_id, user_id, type — and calls the discussion's ranking column hotness. Both are names gamification itself has since moved on from: it replaced type with an integer value in 2020, and renamed hotness to trending in its Flarum 2 release.

Creating the modern names would be the obvious choice and it is the wrong one. Gamification's migrations are tracked per extension, so installing it later replays its whole chain — and the two migrations that do this work are unguarded. On a table that already had a value column, adding one is a duplicate-column error; renaming a hotness that was never there is another. Either would mean gamification simply fails to install on any forum that had run Warren first.

The 2019 shape is the only one the chain replays cleanly from. Every later gamification migration then does exactly what it was written to do, to Warren's rows: add value, convert them, drop type, add the timestamps, add the foreign keys, add the unique index, rename the ranking column. A forum that switches ends up with a table indistinguishable from one gamification built itself.

Warren pays for that by reading both shapes at runtime, which is a dozen lines in one class, and by ranking with gamification's arithmetic rather than reddit's where the two differ. Agreeing with the neighbour matters more than being right alone for a column neither extension owns by itself.

The one thing to know

🚨 Uninstalling fof/gamification drops the shared table. Its own down migration runs dropIfExists('post_votes') and drops the two discussion columns. That is its behaviour, not something Warren can intercept — so if you remove gamification, you lose the vote history, including votes cast through Warren.

Warren's own migrations never remove anything. Disabling or uninstalling Warren leaves every vote in place. The asymmetry is deliberate: a theme must not be able to destroy a forum's data on its way out.

Settings


Row density	Roomy, or the classic dense list.
Default view	Hot, or Latest.
Show the About panel	Off gives the width back to the feed.
Hashtags in the cloud	Only when the Hashtags extension is enabled.
Maximum reply indent	How far a reply can move right before it stops. Deeper replies still sit under their parent.
Let people vote on their own posts	Only when gamification is not installed; it has its own.

Requirements


Flarum	`2.0` or newer
PHP	`8.3+`

Nothing else is required.

Suggested	What it adds
`flarum/mentions`	Threaded comments. Without it, discussions render flat.
`fof/gamification`	Ranks, vote notifications and per-user points on the same votes.
`flarum/tags`	The community mark and name on every post.
`ernestdefoe/hashtags`	The hashtag cloud in the rail.

Installation

composer require ernestdefoe/warren
php flarum cache:clear

Then enable Warren in the admin panel.

Tip

Only one theme should be enabled at a time — two compile into one stylesheet and fight. Wardrobe exists if you want several installed and a per-member picker.

Contributing

If you are porting anything from Cascade, take it from main as it stands today, not from an older copy. Several shell bugs were fixed there that are easy to reintroduce by copying the earlier shape:

align-self: flex-start inside a column flex container sizes the sidebar to its content — a 1842px rail inside a 768px page.
A column gap of 0 leaves the rail flush against the feed, and padding cannot fix it because the nav takes its width from the sidebar variable.
overflow-y on the rail makes it a clipping container on both axes, so it eats its own dropdowns.
Touch targets below 44px on phones and tablets.
Avatar initials get translated into words by the browser unless marked notranslate — a user called Ernest renders as "AND" on a Spanish page.
The sidebar stacks above the feed on mobile unless it is explicitly ordered below it.

Licence

MIT.

ernestdefoe / warren

Package info

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