[buddypress-trac] [BuddyPress Trac] #8006: UI Enhancements for 4.0

[buddypress-trac]

#8006: UI Enhancements for 4.0
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 Reporter:  andre57          |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  feature request  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Under Consideration
Component:  Core             |     Version:
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:                   |
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Changes (by DJPaul):

 * type:  defect (bug) => feature request
 * milestone:  Awaiting Review => Under Consideration


Comment:

 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 of.
 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 loose 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.

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Ticket URL: <https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8006#comment:1>
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