The Future of Bootstrap

[mnordhaus]

Hi,

I See activities that indicate that HugoBlox is developing into a TailwindCSS system. I hope my assumptions are wrong and Bootstrap will still be developed also regarding new Blox. I am a Solutions Architect and worked for more than 10 years consulting CMS / DXP Projects. Please: Tailwind is not a good path for Content Management and Web projects. It is more for quick mocks and prototyping when you are too lazy to work with CSS.

Tailwind is a step backward in the long run.

I hope the Bootstrap module will still receive all the ne updates and Blox. I also very pessimistic about the Idea running both frameworks parallel.

Best,

Markus

[gcushen]

Thanks for the feedback!

As an open project driven by community, it largely depends on (a) which framework(s) the community want, and (b) which framework(s) the community are going to help contribute to.

We are developing the Tailwind-variant based on demand from the community for a Tailwind variant. However, over a million sites have been created with the Hugo Blox framework since its creation 7 years ago, and the majority of those sites are using the Bootstrap-styled Blox, so I'm sure there will continue to be other contributors helping to maintain and improve the Bootstrap version.

The main contributors we are looking for on the Bootstrap variant, is for someone to upgrade it to the latest version of Bootstrap (which requires major breaking changes). Besides that, everyone is pretty happy with the Bootstrap version as it's very stable given the 7 years of development and improvement effort that's gone into it so far. If anyone wants to get involved helping to create a PR to upgrade the blox-bootstrap module to the latest version of Bootstrap, I'm sure the community will be delighted :)

[mnordhaus]

Thank you for the reply. I understand that this is an open source project. Nevertheless, as you stated, there are already "million sites".

That means new Blox will be created for the Tailwind Module only? How will the maintenance be regarding the bootstrap module, will there be updates (like new Blox or fields or something) from the core maintainer team?

I am happy to get involved in some ways. I always give back (and sponsor good projects I use). For instance I might have a staticcms module ready in a few month. I have it up and running for a first project that goes live next week.

[gcushen]

That means new Blox will be created for the Tailwind Module only? How will the maintenance be regarding the bootstrap module, will there be updates (like new Blox or fields or something) from the core maintainer team?

For the Tailwind roadmap, currently, the Tailwind-styled blox are something completely new that are still in development. The first step is to complete the Tailwind module so that it at least roughly has parity with the Bootstrap module.

For the Bootstrap roadmap, the short-term is as stated above, for the community to get involved helping us to upgrade the blox and layouts to the latest version of Bootstrap.

It's too early to predict the long-term roadmap for the Bootstrap module as that depends on what feedback we receive from the community (such as what other replies we get in this thread and in Discord etc.).

[mnordhaus]

Thank you for clarification. I stated my opinion already about tailwind. My experience is that it is hyped somehow, maybe because you do not need to learn CSS - i.d.k exactly.

Anyhow it is really because of my personal interest now and I hope you can point me to an answer:
I might miss something, that I have overseen through the years, but exactly because of that, I am curious what are the other, main drivers for tailwind? Some survey or something? Or is there a real technical/architectural reason that I do not understand?

One last thing:
I have just seen the stales pull requests, that indicate the difficulties for upgrading.

Based on the pull requests and the fact that Hugo Blox basically supports different frameworks through modules, I have the vision to simply create a separate Bootstrap5 module, like it has been done with tailwind. As bootstrap 5 is pretty different to 4, that might be the only feasible way... But that needs resources. I like to finish the staticcms.org project first. Otherwise nothing gets ready :-).

[gcushen]

Based on the pull requests and the fact that Hugo Blox basically supports different frameworks through modules, I have the vision to simply create a separate Bootstrap5 module, like it has been done with tailwind. As bootstrap 5 is pretty different to 4, that might be the only feasible way... But that needs resources

Yes, you can find two attempts from the community to migrate the Bootstrap module to the latest version. The main challenge is that the Bootstrap team entirely re-wrote Bootstrap. So, the new version of Bootstrap is an entirely different framework.

As such, really all the blox-bootstrap CSS needs to effectively be deleted and re-designed using the new Bootstrap classes. For example, the new version of Bootstrap supports dark mode, but the old version of Bootstrap that blox-bootstrap uses does not support dark mode. Basically, the Hugo Blox community created their own version of Bootstrap with dark mode support to address all the limitations.

As you discovered, one of the main issues was that the previous contributors attempted a "hacky" approach to update the Bootstrap dependencies but not to update all the HTML and JS to use the new classes or to re-design the CSS from scratch using the new classes. Due to the "hacky" approach in those PRs, they experienced a lot of strange issues that they found difficult to debug.

[mnordhaus]

I believe that this turns into a productive discussion here.

As such, really all the blox-bootstrap CSS needs to effectively be deleted

I would not see deleted, as you also stated that there are already a lot of existing websites with bootstrap 4 out there. Bootstrap 4 will exists for many years from now and will get patches one way or the other. It is also very stable and robust. But starting a new project with BS5 is a good idea.

However I am a believer in putting some thoughts into the ring first before starting something quite big. I condensed the issue into a Venn diagram here:

There is the core and other common things like CMS (wether it is tina.io, staticcms or decap, however it would be another dimension and is out of scope for this discussion), documentation, utilities, build processes and the overall architectural concept.

Marketing is something I have put differently. The current marketing message pinpoints towards tailwind and refers Bootstrap as "old", that will shy away Bootstrap devs. But it makes sense that there are different target groups. Also there is some kind of specific documentation for Bootstrap and for Tailwind.

However I see more commonalities than differences in that regard (documentation and marketing) so. My concern is to get to a good strategy for marketing this project here in a way that it does not tell "Bootstrap is dead" etc.

I realize that there is a lot of resources needed to maintain 3 layout modules. As the majority of code is so to speak in each layout module.

But why not keep the marketing and documentation as unified as possible?