If you are a web designer then you haven't missed the beta releases of Bootstrap 5. As on our forum, a question appeared about supporting Bootstrap 5, I think it's time to write a little blog about it.
First of all, when your product is based upon important tooling, and that tooling enters a new version that has compatibility issues with its predecessor, then it is important to follow the progress as it influences the use of PHsPeed, right? We started years ago with Dojo and moved to bootstrap (3), which was quite an achievement. Moving to bootstrap 4 was quite a change due to huge incompatibilities. It also took a very long time before bootstrap 4 was released as a real version. Actually, it came as a surprise as we had abandoned following the development because it did not seem to reach the production state. But when it did we had to work hard to be able to support it and had to create a lot of code to fix compatibility issues.
Fortunately, we have no users using bootstrap 3 anymore and we could deprecate it. (It is not supported anymore). With Bootstrap 4 it is different. There are quite a number of users of Bootstrap 4, so we will not be able to abandon support as long as BS 4 is widely used.
The development of Bootstrap 5 is not comparable to Bootstrap 4. The releases are following up frequently, which means that we want to stay close as over time, Bootstrap 5 will be the main library, developers will use. So when it gets released we will be close to implementing it.
Should you migrate your applications to BS 5? That is a question that we cannot answer. It depends. It depends on the new features that BS 5 brings that you really need. We still have BS 3 applications in the field as the developer doesn't want to migrate because the application and front-end work fine, and is focussing on new software. And there is nothing wrong with that IMHO. I can imagine the situation where your old applications are maintained in BS 4 and create your new projects in BS 5. After all, a lot of the functionality is hidden in properties and PHsPeed does most of the hard work. But if migrating is really easy then ...
What are the differences?
We already started implementing Bootstrap 5 PHsPeed. In the preferences, you will find this under the JS and CSS section where the bootstrap library has a variable to allocate the required version. In the project preferences, you can set the required Bootstrap version. But there are some issues. Not all components will work as expected. Modal forms simply don't work yet. Also, be aware that all of this is beta, even the libraries. So use it for your own investigation, but not for production. Applications build for BS 5 are not necessarily easy to migrate back to 4. Over time, we will fix the found issues. But if you have time to investigate, all help is welcome as usual.
Happy coding!