README

See a member's rhythm, not just their volume.

An activity map on every profile — and, if you want it, a compact trace beside every post and on user cards.

Press any square and it tells you what happened that day: 2 things on September 7, 2026 — 1 discussion started · 1 reply.

On a phone the map scrolls sideways inside the profile card, and it opens on the newest weeks:

Why not just copy GitHub's graph

Because GitHub's has six problems, and on a forum they matter more than they do on a code host.

It counts one undifferentiated thing. Cadence separates discussions, replies, likes, reactions and best answers, and only offers the kinds a member actually has.
Its scale is relative to each person's own busiest day, so someone with two posts all year and someone with two hundred produce similar-looking graphs. Cadence uses an absolute scale with a legend that states real numbers, so two profiles can be compared.
It shows a fixed year. Someone who joined last month gets eleven months of grey, which reads as "inactive" when the truth is "new". Cadence starts at the join date.
Colour is the only encoding. Cadence's levels differ in lightness as well as hue, and every square carries its real numbers for screen readers.
It's decoration. Cadence's squares are buttons: press one and it tells you what happened that day.
It can't tell you when someone is around. Cadence stores hourly, so a day is the reader's day rather than the server's.

Where it shows

Placement	Default
The full map on member profiles	On
A 26-week sparkline beside every post	Off
A sparkline on user cards	Off

🚨 The sparklines cost no extra requests. They read an attribute that rides along on the user the page had already loaded. A placement that appears once per post cannot fetch its own data — thirty posts would be thirty requests, which is how a shared host runs out of database connections and returns 500 for the whole forum rather than for the decoration that caused it.

Settings

Admin → Cadence:

Installation

composer require ernestdefoe/cadence
php flarum cache:clear
php flarum cadence:rebuild

That last command is worth running once. Cadence maintains its counts from events as they happen, so on a forum with existing history it starts empty until you rebuild — and a map that tells every member they have never done anything is worse than no map.

php flarum cadence:rebuild

Rebuilds every bucket from your posts and likes. Safe to re-run.

🚨 Reactions and best answers cannot be rebuilt — neither records when it happened, so those two accumulate from the day you install rather than backfilling. Posts and likes rebuild exactly.

Works alongside Calendar

ernestdefoe/calendar has a profile heatmap of its own. When Cadence is installed and showing on profiles, Calendar stands its own one down, so nobody ends up with two. Turn Cadence's profile placement off and Calendar's comes back.

How it stays cheap

Activity is rolled up into one row per member, per hour, per kind. A profile view is an indexed range scan over that member's own rows — it never aggregates over posts, which on a forum of any size is a table scan per profile visit.

Hourly rather than daily is what lets the day boundary be decided when the map is read, in the reader's timezone, instead of being baked into the data forever at the server's.

Requirements

Flarum 2.0
PHP 8.3+

Licence

MIT.

ernestdefoe / cadence

Package info

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