Opened 6 years ago
Closed 3 months ago
#8006 closed feature request (maybelater)
UI Enhancements for 4.0
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Owned by: | |
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| Milestone: | Priority: | normal | |
| Severity: | normal | Version: | |
| Component: | Core | Keywords: | |
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Description
Bootstrap UI/templates is needed to compete with competitors. Without modern look and feel developers will move to newer community plugins to save time. What will it take to modernize the templates to a modern UI? 4.0?
Change History (2)
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Thanks for starting the ticket, @andre57. Interesting questions!
This year, we shipped a new default set of templates with BuddyPress ("Nouveau" templates). These are of a higher quality, more maintainable, and have more features that classic templates that it replaced. I think this marked the 4th major templating change for BuddyPress in its 10 year history, which feels pretty good to me.
Though admittedly there was a 4(-ish) year gap since the last generation shipped, volunteer projects always make progress when someone wants to work on something, and the idea of building new templates was pretty intense and extremely daunting, which I think put many of us off. Fortunately, we had a small team of contributors who took on that challenge, which become Nouveau, and it took them around 18 months (I think, maybe more) from start to finish.
As a project, I feel we learnt that next time we do this, it won't be a monolithic set of templates. There was also a lot of complexity and compromise about maintaining support for existing customisations, especially those introduced by plugins. Our 3rd party plugin ecosystem is not as strong as it was 5 years ago, and if we entirely broke compatibility with the main BuddyPress plugins, I think we'd lose users.
If I had to guess, we'll either end up having multiple "themes" you can apply to separate BuddyPress components (e.g. one to Activity, and a different theme for Groups), or take a brave conceptual jump over to having more loosely-connected bits of functionality, which might place nicely into 2019's Gutenberg's plan to becoming a layout editor, rather than just a content editor.
Regardless of what happens, it'd need more developer contributors interesting in making these sorts of things happen. To answer your question directly, it'd take a lot more people and a lot of time and effort, than we seem to have available right now.