Cascade 0.2.0

The second feature release of the alpha. Three presets instead of two, members can pick their own, a neutral palette, a much wider feed, pinned rails, and a hashtag cloud.

Three presets, and members choose

Facebook-style (wall)	Cards on a tinted ground, dense chrome, a wide labelled action bar.
X-style (timeline)	No cards. One column between hairlines, a sticky tab strip, a quiet action bar.
Bluesky-style (stream)	New. One column again, but the row separators are inset to the text, the spacing is looser, and the actions get pill hovers.

An admin still sets the forum's default. A new Let members choose their own setting adds a Feed style picker to each member's own settings page — their choice applies to them alone, and anyone who leaves it on Use the forum's default keeps following the admin. Turn the setting off to hold the whole forum to one look.

The choice is stamped server-side from the reader's own preference, so there is no flash of the wrong preset before JS runs.

A neutral graphite palette

The presets used to carry their lineage's brand colours as well as its structure. They now share one neutral graphite ramp and are told apart by structure alone — cards, hairline rows, inset rows.

The ramp has no hue on purpose: a grey with a cast reads as "almost blue" beside your accent and fights it. Pick whatever accent suits your forum under Appearance; Cascade still adds no accent setting of its own.

A much wider feed

viewport	feed	in 0.1.1
1280	690	640
1440	832	760
1920	904	820
2560	1004	900

The rails barely move — the growth goes to the middle. Below 1200 the right rail is hidden and the feed now takes the space it vacates, instead of capping itself and leaving a strip of dead page.

Both rails stay put

Navigation and the widgets stay on screen while the feed scrolls. A rail taller than the window scrolls inside itself rather than burying its last items off-screen.

Hashtag cloud widget

A weighted cloud of the most-used hashtags in the right rail, beside Trending. Sized by rank, not raw count — on a real forum the counts are lopsided, and size-by-count gives one enormous word and a field of specks.

Appears only when ernestdefoe/hashtags is enabled, and reads that extension's own API rather than counting anything itself. Cascade never depends on it.

Also fixed

• Narrow widths got a full pass. Wall stops pretending to be cards where there is no room for ground around them; the row presets lost a double indent that pinned the reply preview to the right edge; the media mosaic no longer shows a lighter panel behind images that have not loaded.
• The scrollbar track takes the page's own background. Chrome paints it #2B2B2B even in dark mode, which on a dark ground is a grey strip down the window.

Notes

Still an alpha, and still MIT. Bug reports very welcome — most of this release came from them.

• Support: https://ernestdefoe.online
• Packagist: https://packagist.org/packages/ernestdefoe/cascade