ernestdefoe / time-capsule

1.0.0 2026-11-10 16:14 UTC

Requires

• php: ^8.3
• ext-sodium: *
• flarum/core: ^2.0

Requires (Dev)

• flarum/gdpr: ^2.0
• flarum/phpstan: ^2.0
• flarum/tags: ^2.0
• flarum/testing: ^2.0

MIT

• Ernest Defoe

• community
• future
• letters
• flarum
• flarum-extension
• time capsule

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-11-10 16:22 UTC

README

Letters to the future, for Flarum 2. Members write a letter, add photos, and pick the day it opens. Until then it's sealed: nobody can read it, not even the admins.

• Write to your future self. A letter, up to four photos, and an open date: one tap for next New Year, 1, 5 or 10 years, or the forum's next birthday, or any date you like.
• Really sealed. Until its day a letter is a card: an envelope with a wax seal, "Opens in 3 years, 2 months", and how far along it is. Its words and photos aren't sent to anyone, the writer included, unless they chose "let me reread it".
• Encrypted at rest. Letters and photos are encrypted with a key that is never in the database, so a look at the tables, or a database backup, reads nothing. Photos are kept outside the public folder and their location data is dropped.
• Opening day. The scheduler opens letters on the minute their day starts. The writer gets a notification and an email, and the first time they read it the envelope opens. A public letter shows up under "Recently opened", and can start a discussion as its writer.
• Community capsules. An admin starts a forum-wide capsule ("Hopes and predictions for 2027"), members add letters, and everything opens on one day for everyone, with a live countdown on the Time Capsule page, a notification for every member and an optional discussion.
• A home for it all. /time-capsule has your sealed letters, your opened ones, recently opened public letters, the community countdown and past community capsules.
• Safe to run. Opening is idempotent: the scheduler can run every minute, overlap a page load, or crash halfway, and nobody is notified twice or gets two discussions. Forums without a running scheduler still open letters when they're viewed.
• Permissions to view, write letters, run the community capsule and delete letters as a moderator.
• GDPR: with Flarum's GDPR extension, a member's letters are in their data export (sealed ones as their card) and are deleted on erasure.

A letter, opened	Writing one

Back up the key

Letters are encrypted with the key in storage/time-capsule/key (or 'time-capsule' => ['key' => '<base64, 32 bytes>'] in config.php). Back up storage/time-capsule/ with your database: without the key, sealed letters can never be opened.

Install

composer require ernestdefoe/time-capsule

Flarum's scheduler must be running for letters to open on time (how).

Update

composer update ernestdefoe/time-capsule
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Links

• Packagist
• GitHub