README

A clean three-column community theme for Flarum 2, recreating the look of Central, the Discourse theme Carson Chang and the Discourse team previewed on Meta and never shipped. There is a sidebar with your tag tree on every page, a card holding the discussion list, and a column on the right with your profile and the forum's Top Contributors.

What it does

A clean header. It holds the logo, a rounded search field, the Messages inbox (flarum/messages), notifications and your avatar.
A sidebar on every page. It lists Home, Following (flarum/subscriptions), Admin for admins, and Start a Discussion. Under those is the full tag tree: each primary tag with its children hanging beneath on a hairline, in flarum/tags' own order, plus the busiest secondary tags. Every link other extensions add goes under More, so twenty extensions never push your tags off the screen. Your own footer links (About, Privacy, Terms…) sit at the bottom.
Unread dots on tags with something new since your last visit. Read state is kept in the reader's own browser and costs no query.
One card for the list. A title row says what you are looking at: Home, Following, a search, or a tag with its colour, description and child tags. The sort dropdown sits on the same row.
Compact rows with the avatar, title, tags as small coloured squares and "who replied when". On the right is a like count for the opening post (flarum/likes) beside the reply count. Under the title are the people taking part: the author first, then whoever was active most recently, then "+N".
A right column with:
- your profile card: your cover (Backdrop, framed exactly as on your profile, or sycho/flarum-profile-cover; otherwise a band in your own colour), avatar, name, handle, bio (fof/user-bio) and Edit Profile. Guests see the forum's welcome with Sign up and Log in instead.
- Top Contributors, switchable between today, this week, this month and this year. It ranks by likes received, or by comments on a forum without flarum/likes.
- any widget you add. Both blocks are also offered as widgets for Bespoke and FoF Forum Widgets. FoF's side widgets stack in the same column.
Light and dark, following Flarum's own colour scheme setting. Central's neutral greys sit underneath, the forum's primary colour is the accent, and the font is Work Sans.

Discussions

The title, with its tags beneath, heads the page. Beside the posts are Reply, Follow, and one panel holding:

the faces of the people taking part, and how many replies and people there are (and views, with fof/discussion-views)
a restyled scrubber: a thick rail, the posts you have read in dark ink and the unread ones in the accent colour, a small card beside the handle ("4 of 57 · October 3"), and the date beside Original Post and Now.

Dark	A tag, dark	As a guest

On phones

The sidebar becomes a drawer, opened from a tab bar along the bottom with Home, Tags, + (new discussion), Messages and More. Between phone and desktop the sidebar shrinks to a rail of icons and tag colours.

Tested on real devices: Mobile Safari on an iPhone 17 Pro Max simulator, and Chrome on a Pixel 9 emulator.

Home	A discussion, dark	Android	iPhone: the drawer

Settings

Admin → Concourse

Show the profile card and Show Top Contributors.
The period Top Contributors starts on and how many people it lists (1–10).
Show who is taking part: the faces under each discussion and in the side panel. Turning it off also drops their queries.
Sidebar footer links, one per line as Label | address. Only pages on the forum (/p/about), https:// links and mailto: are accepted.

With Wardrobe

Concourse works as one of several themes under ernestdefoe/wardrobe. A visitor on another theme gets none of its CSS, JS or server work: no child-tag query, no like counts, no participants, no font preload.

Cost

Measured with the test suite (enforced there) and by timing a forum with 166,000 posts.


Discussion list, 1 row or 50	+3 queries for the whole page (opening-post likes, the participants, their accounts); flat with the row count
Participants	only each discussion's latest 30 posts are read, through the existing index. About 5 ms per page at 166k posts
Discussion page	+2 (the participants and their accounts)
Forum payload	+2 (child tags and their parents), flat with the number of tags
Top Contributors	one grouped query per period, cached for 5 minutes (today) to an hour (this year) and shared by everyone; 1 query per request once warm
forum.js	6.2 KB gzipped
forum.css	+4.3 KB gzipped

Top Contributors only counts what a guest could see: public discussions and visible, approved comments. A shared number never includes activity behind a restricted tag.

Installation

composer require ernestdefoe/concourse

Then enable Concourse in your admin panel. To update:

composer update ernestdefoe/concourse
php flarum cache:clear

Credits

The design is Central's, by Carson Chang and the Discourse team (MIT, © Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.). See NOTICE. The code is written fresh for Flarum. Work Sans is by the Work Sans Project Authors (SIL OFL 1.1) and is self-hosted.

If Concourse is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee.

Licence

MIT

ernestdefoe / concourse

Package info

Security

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