peopleinside / fla-polling
Lightweight real-time polling for Flarum 2.0 - No WebSocket, No SSH required
Package info
github.com/PeopleInside/fla-polling
Language:Blade
Type:flarum-extension
pkg:composer/peopleinside/fla-polling
1.1.9
2026-06-13 14:24 UTC
Requires
- flarum/core: ^2.0
README
A lightweight real-time polling extension for Flarum 2.0 that provides instant updates for new discussions and notifications without requiring WebSockets, SSH access, or Node.js.
🚀 Features
- ✅ No WebSocket required - Works with standard HTTP requests
- ✅ No SSH or Node.js - Perfect for shared hosting
- ✅ Self-hosted - Complete control, no external dependencies
- ✅ Lightweight - Minimal server resources consumption
- ✅ Real-time updates - Check for new discussions and notifications every 10 seconds (configurable)
- ✅ Visual notifications - Banner for new discussions and badge for notification count
- ✅ Zero configuration - Install and it just works
- 🌍 Multilingual support - English and Italian included (easy to add more languages)
📋 How It Works
Instead of maintaining a persistent WebSocket connection, FLA Polling uses HTTP polling:
- Every 10 seconds, the browser sends a lightweight AJAX request to the server
- The server checks the database for the latest discussion ID and unread notification count
- If there are changes, the UI updates automatically:
- A banner appears when new discussions are posted
- The notification badge updates with the new count
This approach is extremely efficient and works on any standard LAMP/LEMP stack.
Performance Impact
For a forum with 100 concurrent users and 10-second polling interval:
- 10 HTTP requests per second to your server
- Each request executes 2 simple database queries (less than 1ms each)
- Total overhead: negligible (equivalent to a few page loads per minute)
📦 Installation
Via Composer (Recommended)
composer require peopleinside/fla-polling